The Book of Dragons, Opening, part 1, sentence 129

Not mad; but if I may express it so, he was--er--too clever by half.

Who acts: I, Lionel · What happens: express, be · To what, where: Book

This is a sentence of «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Opening, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I, Lionel), 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	Not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	2 mad	advmod
2	mad	mad	ADJ	Degree=Pos	root	root
3	;	;	PUNCT	_	13 was	punct
4	but	but	CCONJ	_	13 was	cc
5	if	if	SCONJ	_	8 express	mark
6	I	I	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	8 express	nsubj
7	may	may	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	8 express	aux
8	express	express	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	13 was	advcl
9	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	8 express	obj
10	so	so	ADV	_	8 express	advmod
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	8 express	punct
12	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	13 was	nsubj
13	was	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 mad	conj
14	--	--	PUNCT	_	15 er	punct
15	er	er	INTJ	_	2 mad	discourse
16	--	--	PUNCT	_	18 clever	punct
17	too	too	ADV	_	18 clever	advmod
18	clever	clever	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 mad	conj
19	by	by	ADP	_	20 half	case
20	half	half	NOUN	Number=Sing NumForm=Word NumType=Frac	18 clever	obl
21	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 mad	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	express	may	I	Book					vn reflexive_appearance-48.1.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Theme
2	be	past	Lionel						vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme

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: «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Project Gutenberg book 23661 (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/pg23661/1/129/