Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Inchcape Rock., sentence 22

There were no waves to set it in motion.

Who acts: waves · What happens: be, set · To what, where: bell, motion

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 (waves), 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	There	there	PRON	PronType=Dem	2 were	expl
2	were	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	no	no	DET	PronType=Neg	4 waves	det
4	waves	wave	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 were	nsubj
5	to	to	PART	_	6 set	mark
6	set	set	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	2 were	advcl
7	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	6 set	obj
8	in	in	ADP	_	9 motion	case
9	motion	motion	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 set	obl
10	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 were	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	be	past	no waves			there			vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	set	to-infinitive	no waves not said here	bell		motion			vn put-9.1-2 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent it=Theme in motion=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/pg18442/48/22/