The Book of Dragons, The Dragon Tamers], sentence 176
And they would light a halfpenny's worth of colored fire to look at him by.
Who acts: children · What happens: light, color, look · To what, where: worth
This is a sentence of «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, The Dragon Tamers]. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (children), 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 | And | and | CCONJ | _ | 4 light | cc |
| 2 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 4 light | nsubj |
| 3 | would | would | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 4 light | aux |
| 4 | light | light | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 5 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 6 halfpenny | det |
| 6 | halfpenny | halfpenny | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 worth | nmod:poss |
| 7 | 's | 's | PART | _ | 6 halfpenny | case |
| 8 | worth | worth | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 light | obj |
| 9 | of | of | ADP | _ | 11 fire | case |
| 10 | colored | color | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 11 fire | amod |
| 11 | fire | fire | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 worth | nmod |
| 12 | to | to | PART | _ | 13 look | mark |
| 13 | look | look | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 4 light | advcl |
| 14 | at | at | ADP | _ | 15 him | case |
| 15 | him | he | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 13 look | obl |
| 16 | by | by | ADP | _ | 13 look | obl |
| 17 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 light | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | light | would | children = child | a halfpenny's worth of colored fire | vn preparing-26.3-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent worth=Product | ||||
| 2 | color | participle | vn coloring-24 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent | ||||||
| 3 | look | to-infinitive | children = child not said here | at Dragon | vn peer-30.3 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent at he=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/pg23661/12/176/