Fifty Famous Stories Retold, I. the City., sentence 1

There was once a little boy whose name was Richard Whit'ting-ton; but everybody called him Dick.

Who acts: little boy, name, everybody, Richard Whit'ting ton · What happens: be, call, name · To what, where: Richard Whit'ting ton, boy · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, I. the City.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (little boy, name, everybody, Richard Whit'ting ton), 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 was	expl
2	was	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	once	once	ADV	NumForm=Word NumType=Mult	2 was	advmod
4	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	6 boy	det
5	little	little	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 boy	amod
6	boy	boy	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 was	nsubj
7	whose	whose	PRON	Poss=Yes PronType=Rel	8 name	nmod:poss
8	name	name	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 ton	nsubj
9	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	13 ton	cop
10	Richard	Richard	PROPN	Number=Sing	13 ton	compound
11	Whit'ting	whit'ting	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 ton	compound
12	-	-	PUNCT	_	11 Whit'ting	punct
13	ton	ton	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 boy	acl:relcl
14	;	;	PUNCT	_	17 called	punct
15	but	but	CCONJ	_	17 called	cc
16	everybody	everybody	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Tot	17 called	nsubj
17	called	call	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 was	parataxis
18	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	17 called	obj
19	Dick	Dick	PROPN	Number=Sing	17 called	xcomp
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 was	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	other	roles by
1	be	past	a little boy			there	once property	vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	is a	past	Richard Whit'ting ton's name	Richard Whit'ting ton				tree rules
3	call	past	everybody		boy			vn initiate_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent he=Recipient
4	name		Richard Whit'ting ton					nom name «communication transitive»: poss=agent

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/pg18442/49/1/