Fifty Famous Stories Retold, How Napoleon Crossed the Alps., sentence 9
People laughed at the thought of an army of sixty thousand men crossing the Alps where there was no road.
Who acts: People, thousand men · What happens: laugh, cross, think · To what, where: thought, Alps, army
This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, How Napoleon Crossed the Alps.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (People, thousand men), 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 | People | people | NOUN | Number=Plur | 2 laughed | nsubj |
| 2 | laughed | laugh | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | at | at | ADP | _ | 5 thought | case |
| 4 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 5 thought | det |
| 5 | thought | thought | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 laughed | obl |
| 6 | of | of | ADP | _ | 8 army | case |
| 7 | an | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 8 army | det |
| 8 | army | army | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 thought | nmod |
| 9 | of | of | ADP | _ | 12 men | case |
| 10 | sixty | sixty | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 11 thousand | compound |
| 11 | thousand | thousand | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 12 men | nummod |
| 12 | men | man | NOUN | Number=Plur | 8 army | nmod |
| 13 | crossing | cross | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 12 men | acl |
| 14 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 15 Alps | det |
| 15 | Alps | Alp | PROPN | Number=Plur | 13 crossing | obj |
| 16 | where | where | ADV | PronType=Rel | 18 was | advmod |
| 17 | there | there | PRON | PronType=Dem | 18 was | expl |
| 18 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 15 Alps | acl:relcl |
| 19 | no | no | DET | PronType=Neg | 20 road | det |
| 20 | road | road | NOUN | Number=Sing | 18 was | nsubj |
| 21 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 laughed | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | laugh | past | People | the thought of a army of thousand men | vn nonverbal_expression-40.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent | ||||
| 2 | cross | gerund | thousand men not said here | the Alps | vn crane-40.3.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent alp=Patient | ||||
| 3 | think | a army of thousand men | nom thought «cognition transitive»: of=patient |
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/pg18442/26/9/