Fifty Famous Stories Retold, I. the Three Questions., sentence 15

How can I help but think ill of you?

Who acts: I · What happens: help, think

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 (I), 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	How	how	ADV	PronType=Int	4 help	advmod
2	can	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	4 help	aux
3	I	I	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	4 help	nsubj
4	help	help	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
5	but	but	CCONJ	_	6 think	cc
6	think	think	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	4 help	conj
7	ill	ill	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 think	xcomp
8	of	of	ADP	_	9 you	case
9	you	you	PRON	Case=Acc Person=2 PronType=Prs	7 ill	obl
10	?	?	PUNCT	_	4 help	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	help	can	I						vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent
2	think speech: other	infinitive	I not said here					ill property	vn focus-87.1-1 «NP V»: agent=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/pg18442/9/15/