Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Blind Men and the Elephant., sentence 14
The third happened to take hold of the elephant's trunk. "
Who acts: third · What happens: happen, take, hold · To what, where: hold, trunk
This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Blind Men and the Elephant.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (third), 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 | The | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 2 third | det |
| 2 | third | third | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 happened | nsubj |
| 3 | happened | happen | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | to | to | PART | _ | 5 take | mark |
| 5 | take | take | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 happened | xcomp |
| 6 | hold | hold | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 take | obj |
| 7 | of | of | ADP | _ | 11 trunk | case |
| 8 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 9 elephant | det |
| 9 | elephant | elephant | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 trunk | nmod:poss |
| 10 | 's | 's | PART | _ | 9 elephant | case |
| 11 | trunk | trunk | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 hold | nmod |
| 12 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 5 take | punct |
| 13 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 take | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | happen | past | the third | tree rules | |||||
| 2 | take | to-infinitive | the third not said here | hold of the elephant's trunk | vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent hold=Theme | ||||
| 3 | hold | the elephant's trunk | nom hold «act transitive»: of=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/pg18442/46/14/