Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Story of Cincinnatus., sentence 32

All shook their heads and were very grave; for it seemed as if there was no hope.

Who acts: it · What happens: shake, be, seem · To what, where: heads

This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Story of Cincinnatus.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (it), 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	All	all	DET	PronType=Tot	2 shook	advmod
2	shook	shake	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	4 heads	nmod:poss
4	heads	head	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 shook	obj
5	and	and	CCONJ	_	8 grave	cc
6	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	8 grave	cop
7	very	very	ADV	_	8 grave	advmod
8	grave	grave	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 shook	conj
9	;	;	PUNCT	_	12 seemed	punct
10	for	for	ADP	_	12 seemed	case
11	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	12 seemed	nsubj
12	seemed	seem	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 shook	parataxis
13	as	as	ADP	_	18 hope	case
14	if	if	SCONJ	_	16 was	mark
15	there	there	PRON	PronType=Dem	16 was	expl
16	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	18 hope	cop
17	no	no	DET	PronType=Neg	18 hope	det
18	hope	hope	NOUN	Number=Sing	12 seemed	obl
19	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 shook	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	shake	past		guards's heads		vn shake-22.3-2 «NP V NP together»: agent=Agent head=Patient
2	is	past			grave property	tree rules
3	seem	past	it			vn seem-109-1-1-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Theme
4	is	past			as no hope	tree rules

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.

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