Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Barmecide Feast., sentence 28

He sat down, as if to a table, and pre-tend-ed to be carving a roast.

Who acts: Barmecide · What happens: sit down, pre-tend-, carve · To what, where: roast

This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Barmecide Feast.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Barmecide), 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	He	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	2 sat	nsubj
2	sat	sit	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	down	down	ADP	_	2 sat	compound:prt
4	,	,	PUNCT	_	9 table	punct
5	as	as	ADP	_	9 table	case
6	if	if	SCONJ	_	9 table	mark
7	to	to	ADP	_	9 table	case
8	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	9 table	det
9	table	table	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 sat	conj
10	,	,	PUNCT	_	12 pre-tend-ed	punct
11	and	and	CCONJ	_	12 pre-tend-ed	cc
12	pre-tend-ed	pre-tend-	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	2 sat	conj
13	to	to	PART	_	15 carving	mark
14	be	be	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	15 carving	aux
15	carving	carve	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	12 pre-tend-ed	advcl
16	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	17 roast	det
17	roast	roast	NOUN	Number=Sing	15 carving	obj
18	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 sat	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	roles by
1	sit down	past	Barmecide		vn assuming_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent
2	pre-tend-	participle	Barmecide not said here		tree rules
3	carve	to-infinitive · progressive	Barmecide not said here	a roast	vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent roast=Theme

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/pg18442/44/28/