Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Antonio Canova., sentence 75
There was nothing that he could do to make the days seem shorter.
Who acts: nothing, gentleman, days · What happens: be, do, make, seem
This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Antonio Canova.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (nothing, gentleman, days), 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 | nothing | nothing | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Neg | 2 was | nsubj |
| 4 | that | that | SCONJ | _ | 7 do | mark |
| 5 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 7 do | nsubj |
| 6 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 7 do | aux |
| 7 | do | do | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 nothing | acl |
| 8 | to | to | PART | _ | 9 make | mark |
| 9 | make | make | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 7 do | advcl |
| 10 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 11 days | det |
| 11 | days | day | NOUN | Number=Plur | 12 seem | nsubj |
| 12 | seem | seem | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 9 make | ccomp |
| 13 | shorter | short | ADJ | Degree=Cmp | 12 seem | xcomp |
| 14 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 was | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | be | past | nothing | there | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 2 | do | could | gentleman | vn act-114-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 3 | make | to-infinitive | gentleman not said here | tree rules | |||||
| 4 | seem | present | the days | short property | vn seem-109-1-1-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Theme |
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/pg18442/54/75/