Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Blind Men and the Elephant., sentence 2

They had often heard of el-e-phants, but they had never seen one; for, being blind, how could they?

Who acts: men · What happens: hear, not see, be · To what, where: men, one

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 (men), 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	4 heard	nsubj:pass
2	had	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 heard	aux
3	often	often	ADV	_	4 heard	advmod
4	heard	hear	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	root	root
5	of	of	ADP	_	10 phants	case
6	el	el	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 phants	compound
7	-	-	PUNCT	_	6 el	punct
8	e	e	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 phants	compound
9	-	-	PUNCT	_	10 phants	punct
10	phants	phant	NOUN	Number=Plur	4 heard	obl
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	16 seen	punct
12	but	but	CCONJ	_	16 seen	cc
13	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	16 seen	nsubj
14	had	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	16 seen	aux
15	never	never	ADV	PronType=Neg	16 seen	advmod
16	seen	see	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	4 heard	conj
17	one	one	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	16 seen	obj
18	;	;	PUNCT	_	22 blind	punct
19	for	for	ADP	_	22 blind	case
20	,	,	PUNCT	_	22 blind	punct
21	being	be	AUX	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	22 blind	cop
22	blind	blind	ADJ	Degree=Pos	4 heard	conj
23	,	,	PUNCT	_	25 could	punct
24	how	how	ADV	PronType=Int	25 could	advmod
25	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	22 blind	aux
26	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	25 could	nsubj
27	?	?	PUNCT	_	4 heard	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	hear	past · perfect · passive		men = man	of el e phants; often property	vn see-30.1-1-1 «NP V S»: subject=Stimulus
2	not see	past · perfect	men = man	one		vn comprehend-87.2-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer one=Stimulus
3	is	could · gerund			blind property	tree rules

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/pg18442/46/2/