Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Story of Cincinnatus., sentence 43
They told him about the great danger the city was in.
Who acts: cloak, city · What happens: tell, be · To what, where: man, great danger · Speech: someone speaks here
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 (cloak, city), 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 | They | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 told | nsubj |
| 2 | told | tell | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | him | he | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 told | iobj |
| 4 | about | about | ADP | _ | 7 danger | case |
| 5 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 7 danger | det |
| 6 | great | great | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 7 danger | amod |
| 7 | danger | danger | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 told | obl |
| 8 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 9 city | det |
| 9 | city | city | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 in | nsubj |
| 10 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 11 in | cop |
| 11 | in | in | ADV | _ | 7 danger | acl:relcl |
| 12 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 told | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | tell speech: assert | past | cloak | man | about the great danger | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP S_ING»: agent=Agent he=Recipient about danger=Topic | |||
| 2 | is | past | the city | the great danger not said here | in property | 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.
This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/27/43/