Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, XXXIII. Why the Negro Is Black, sentence 12
Niggers is niggers now, but de time wuz w'en we 'uz all niggers tergedder."
Who acts: Niggers · What happens: be · To what, where: niggers
This is a sentence of «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, XXXIII. Why the Negro Is Black. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Niggers), 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 | Niggers | nigger | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 niggers | nsubj |
| 2 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 3 niggers | cop |
| 3 | niggers | nigger | NOUN | Number=Plur | root | root |
| 4 | now | now | ADV | PronType=Dem | 3 niggers | advmod |
| 5 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 10 w'en | punct |
| 6 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 10 w'en | cc |
| 7 | de | de | X | Foreign=Yes | 8 time | compound |
| 8 | time | time | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 w'en | compound |
| 9 | wuz | wuz | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 w'en | compound |
| 10 | w'en | w'en | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 niggers | conj |
| 11 | we | we | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs | 13 uz | nsubj |
| 12 | ' | ' | PUNCT | _ | 13 uz | punct |
| 13 | uz | uz | X | Foreign=Yes | 10 w'en | conj |
| 14 | all | all | DET | PronType=Tot | 16 tergedder | det |
| 15 | niggers | nigger | NOUN | Number=Plur | 16 tergedder | compound |
| 16 | tergedder | tergedder | NOUN | Number=Sing | 13 uz | obj |
| 17 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 niggers | punct |
| 18 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 3 niggers | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | present | Niggers | niggers but time wuz w'en | now | tree rules |
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/pg2306/36/12/