Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, XVII. Mr. Rabbit Nibbles Up the Butter, sentence 59
"And what about Brother Possum?" asked the little boy.
Who acts: little boy · What happens: ask
This is a sentence of «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, XVII. Mr. Rabbit Nibbles Up the Butter. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (little boy), 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 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 3 what | punct |
| 2 | And | and | CCONJ | _ | 3 what | cc |
| 3 | what | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 9 asked | obj |
| 4 | about | about | ADP | _ | 6 Possum | case |
| 5 | Brother | Brother | PROPN | Number=Sing | 6 Possum | compound |
| 6 | Possum | Possum | PROPN | Number=Sing | 9 asked | obl |
| 7 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 6 Possum | punct |
| 8 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 6 Possum | punct |
| 9 | asked | ask | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 10 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 12 boy | det |
| 11 | little | little | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 12 boy | amod |
| 12 | boy | boy | NOUN | Number=Sing | 9 asked | obj |
| 13 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 9 asked | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ask speech: ask | past | the little boy | about Brother Possum | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP PP.topic»: agent=Agent what=Recipient about possum=Topic |
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: «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, Project Gutenberg book 2306 (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/pg2306/20/59/