Fifty Famous Stories Retold, III. the Venture., sentence 26

They seemed to say to him,--

Who acts: bells · What happens: seem, say · To what, where: Dick · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, III. the Venture.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (bells), 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	2 seemed	nsubj
2	seemed	seem	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	to	to	PART	_	4 say	mark
4	say	say	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	2 seemed	xcomp
5	to	to	ADP	_	6 him	case
6	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	4 say	obl
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	2 seemed	punct
8	--	--	PUNCT	_	2 seemed	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	seem	past	bells = bell						vn seem-109-1-1-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Theme clause=Attribute
2	say speech: assert	to-infinitive	bells = bell not said here		Dick				vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V PP.recipient S-Quote»: agent=Agent to he=Recipient

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.

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