Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Brave Three Hundred., sentence 13
How could a handful of men hope to stand against so great a host?
Who acts: handful · What happens: hope, stand · To what, where: host, great
This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Brave Three Hundred.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (handful), 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 | How | how | ADV | PronType=Int | 7 hope | advmod |
| 2 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 7 hope | aux |
| 3 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 4 handful | det |
| 4 | handful | handful | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 hope | nsubj |
| 5 | of | of | ADP | _ | 6 men | case |
| 6 | men | man | NOUN | Number=Plur | 4 handful | nmod |
| 7 | hope | hope | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 8 | to | to | PART | _ | 9 stand | mark |
| 9 | stand | stand | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 7 hope | xcomp |
| 10 | against | against | ADP | _ | 12 great | case |
| 11 | so | so | ADV | _ | 12 great | advmod |
| 12 | great | great | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 9 stand | obl |
| 13 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 14 host | det |
| 14 | host | host | NOUN | Number=Sing | 9 stand | obj |
| 15 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 7 hope | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | hope | could | a handful of men | vn long-32.2 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Pivot clause=Theme | |||||
| 2 | stand not said to happen | to-infinitive | a handful of men not said here | a host | great | vn put_spatial-9.2 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent host=Theme against great=Destination |
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/pg18442/39/13/