Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore, Magic and Witchcraft., part 5, sentence 38

But they couldn't lay hands on him.

Who acts: wives · What happens: not lay · To what, where: hands

This is a sentence of «Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore», Magic and Witchcraft., part 5. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (wives), 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	But	but	CCONJ	_	5 lay	cc
2	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	5 lay	nsubj
3	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	5 lay	aux
4	n't	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	5 lay	advmod
5	lay	lay	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
6	hands	hand	NOUN	Number=Plur	5 lay	obj
7	on	on	ADP	_	8 him	case
8	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	5 lay	obl
9	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 lay	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	not lay	could	wives = wife	hands				on FOOL	vn put_spatial-9.2 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent hand=Theme on he=Destination

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: «Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore», Project Gutenberg book 22373 (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/pg22373/46/38/