Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Sir Humphrey Gilbert., sentence 8

When they were three days from land, the wind failed, and the ships lay floating on the waves.

Who acts: ships, wind · What happens: be, fail, lie, float · To what, where: three days, land, waves

This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Sir Humphrey Gilbert.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (ships, wind), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

Parsed by Mova, not checked by a teacher. This tree is Mova's own parse (the en model, on the CPU, when the site is built); it may be wrong.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	When	when	ADV	PronType=Int	5 days	advmod
2	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	5 days	nsubj
3	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	5 days	cop
4	three	three	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	5 days	nummod
5	days	day	NOUN	Number=Plur	root	root
6	from	from	ADP	_	7 land	case
7	land	land	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 days	nmod
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	11 failed	punct
9	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	10 wind	det
10	wind	wind	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 failed	nsubj
11	failed	fail	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	5 days	parataxis
12	,	,	PUNCT	_	16 lay	punct
13	and	and	CCONJ	_	16 lay	cc
14	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	15 ships	det
15	ships	ship	NOUN	Number=Plur	16 lay	nsubj
16	lay	lie	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	11 failed	advcl
17	floating	float	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	16 lay	xcomp
18	on	on	ADP	_	20 waves	case
19	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	20 waves	det
20	waves	wave	NOUN	Number=Plur	17 floating	obl
21	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 days	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	roles by
1	is a	past	ships = ship	three days	land	tree rules
2	fail	past	the wind			vn succeed-74-3-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	lie	past	the ships			tree rules
4	float	gerund	the ships not said here		the waves	vn run-51.3.2-2 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme on wave=Trajectory

One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

Text: «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 18442 (public domain in the USA). Tree: Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/19/8/