Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, XXXIII. Why the Negro Is Black, sentence 21

I ain't seed no Chinee dat I knows un, but dey tells me dey er sorter 'twix' a brown en a brindle.

Who acts: I, dey · What happens: know, tell · To what, where: un, dey, me · Speech: someone speaks here

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 (I, dey), 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	I	I	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	2 ai	nsubj
2	ai	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	n't	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	4 seed	advmod
4	seed	seed	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 ai	obj
5	no	no	DET	PronType=Neg	7 dat	det
6	Chinee	Chinee	PROPN	Number=Sing	7 dat	compound
7	dat	dat	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 ai	obj
8	I	I	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	9 knows	nsubj
9	knows	know	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	7 dat	acl:relcl
10	un	un	NOUN	Number=Sing	9 knows	obj
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	14 tells	punct
12	but	but	CCONJ	_	14 tells	cc
13	dey	dey	NOUN	Number=Sing	14 tells	nsubj
14	tells	tell	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	2 ai	parataxis
15	me	I	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	14 tells	iobj
16	dey	dey	NOUN	Number=Sing	14 tells	obj
17	er	e	ADJ	Degree=Cmp	18 sorter	amod
18	sorter	sorter	NOUN	Number=Sing	14 tells	obj
19	'	'	PUNCT	_	20 twix	punct
20	twix	twix	NOUN	Number=Sing	18 sorter	appos
21	'	'	PUNCT	_	20 twix	punct
22	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	24 en	det
23	brown	brown	ADJ	Degree=Pos	24 en	amod
24	en	en	NOUN	Number=Sing	14 tells	obj
25	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	26 brindle	det
26	brindle	brindle	NOUN	Number=Sing	14 tells	obj
27	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 ai	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	know	present	I	un					vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Experiencer un=Stimulus
2	tell speech: assert	present	dey	dey	me				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/pg2306/36/21/