Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Alexander and Bucephalus., sentence 4
They tried to whip him, but that only made him worse.
Who acts: lus · What happens: try, whip, make · To what, where: King
This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Alexander and Bucephalus.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (lus), 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 tried | nsubj |
| 2 | tried | try | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | to | to | PART | _ | 4 whip | mark |
| 4 | whip | whip | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 2 tried | xcomp |
| 5 | him | he | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 4 whip | obj |
| 6 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 10 made | punct |
| 7 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 10 made | cc |
| 8 | that | that | SCONJ | _ | 10 made | mark |
| 9 | only | only | ADV | _ | 10 made | advmod |
| 10 | made | make | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 2 tried | conj |
| 11 | him | he | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 10 made | obj |
| 12 | worse | bad | ADJ | Degree=Cmp | 10 made | xcomp |
| 13 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 tried | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | try | past | lus = lu | vn try-61.1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality | |||||
| 2 | whip not said to happen | to-infinitive | lus = lu not said here | King | vn knead-26.5 «NP V NP.material»: agent=Agent he=Material | ||||
| 3 | make | past | lus = lu not said here | King | bad property | vn build-26.1-1 «NP.asset V NP»: agent=Asset he=Product |
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/pg18442/37/4/