Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, II. the Wonderful Tar Baby Story, sentence 39

"Did the fox eat the rabbit?" asked the little boy to whom the story had been told.

Who acts: fox, little boy · What happens: eat, ask, tell · To what, where: rabbit, story · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, II. the Wonderful Tar Baby Story. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (fox, 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	_	4 fox	punct
2	Did	do	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 fox	aux
3	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	4 fox	det
4	fox	fox	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 eat	nsubj
5	eat	eat	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
6	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	7 rabbit	det
7	rabbit	rabbit	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 eat	obj
8	?	?	PUNCT	_	5 eat	punct
9	"	"	PUNCT	_	10 asked	punct
10	asked	ask	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	5 eat	conj
11	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	13 boy	det
12	little	little	ADJ	Degree=Pos	13 boy	amod
13	boy	boy	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 asked	obj
14	to	to	ADP	_	15 whom	case
15	whom	whom	PRON	PronType=Rel	10 asked	obl
16	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	17 story	det
17	story	story	NOUN	Number=Sing	20 told	nsubj:pass
18	had	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	20 told	aux
19	been	be	AUX	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	20 told	aux:pass
20	told	tell	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	15 whom	acl:relcl
21	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 eat	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	roles by
1	eat in a quote	present	the fox	the rabbit	vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent rabbit=Patient
2	ask speech: ask	past	the little boy		vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	tell speech: assert	past · perfect · passive		the story	vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: subject=Recipient

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/pg2306/5/39/