Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Sword of Damocles., sentence 20
What if the hair should break?
Who acts: hair · What happens: break
This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Sword of Damocles.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (hair), 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 | What | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 6 break | obj |
| 2 | if | if | SCONJ | _ | 6 break | mark |
| 3 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 4 hair | det |
| 4 | hair | hair | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 break | nsubj |
| 5 | should | should | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 6 break | aux |
| 6 | break | break | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 7 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 6 break | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | break | should | the hair | vn hurt-40.8.3-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer what=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/pg18442/33/20/