Fifty Famous Stories Retold, I. the Three Questions., sentence 1
There was once a king of England whose name was John.
Who acts: king, John · What happens: be, name · To what, where: John
This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, I. the Three Questions.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (king, John), 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 | 5 king | det |
| 5 | king | king | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 John | nsubj |
| 6 | of | of | ADP | _ | 7 England | case |
| 7 | England | England | PROPN | Number=Sing | 5 king | nmod |
| 8 | whose | whose | PRON | Poss=Yes PronType=Rel | 9 name | nmod:poss |
| 9 | name | name | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 John | nsubj |
| 10 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 11 John | cop |
| 11 | John | John | PROPN | Number=Sing | 2 was | parataxis |
| 12 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 was | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | be | past | there | once property | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 2 | is a | past | a king of England | John | tree rules | ||||
| 3 | name | John | 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/pg18442/9/1/