Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Inchcape Rock., sentence 16

The ship stood almost still; there was hardly a breath of air to fill her sails.

Who acts: ship · What happens: stand, be, fill · To what, where: breath, sails

This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Inchcape Rock.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (ship), 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 ship	det
2	ship	ship	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 stood	nsubj
3	stood	stand	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	almost	almost	ADV	_	5 still	advmod
5	still	still	ADV	_	3 stood	advmod
6	;	;	PUNCT	_	8 was	punct
7	there	there	PRON	PronType=Dem	8 was	expl
8	was	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	3 stood	conj
9	hardly	hardly	ADV	_	11 breath	advmod
10	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	11 breath	det
11	breath	breath	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 stood	obl
12	of	of	ADP	_	13 air	case
13	air	air	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 breath	nmod
14	to	to	PART	_	15 fill	mark
15	fill	fill	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	3 stood	advcl
16	her	her	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	17 sails	nmod:poss
17	sails	sail	NOUN	Number=Plur	15 fill	obj
18	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 stood	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	when	roles by
1	stand	past	the ship	a breath of air		still	vn assuming_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent
2	be	past	the ship not said here		there		vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
3	fill	to-infinitive	the ship not said here	wind's sails			vn other_cos-45.4 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Agent sail=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/pg18442/48/16/