The Book of Dragons, The Dragon Tamers], sentence 284
In a few minutes they heard him clanking up the steps.
Who acts: things, Dragon · What happens: hear, clank up · To what, where: Dragon, steps
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 (things, Dragon), 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 | In | in | ADP | _ | 4 minutes | case |
| 2 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 4 minutes | det |
| 3 | few | few | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 4 minutes | amod |
| 4 | minutes | minute | NOUN | Number=Plur | 6 heard | obl |
| 5 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 6 heard | nsubj |
| 6 | heard | hear | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 7 | him | he | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 6 heard | obj |
| 8 | clanking | clank | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 6 heard | xcomp |
| 9 | up | up | ADP | _ | 8 clanking | compound:prt |
| 10 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 11 steps | det |
| 11 | steps | step | NOUN | Number=Plur | 8 clanking | obj |
| 12 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 6 heard | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | hear | past | things = thing | Dragon | minute | tree rules | |||
| 2 | clank up | gerund | Dragon not said here | the steps | vn sound_emission-43.2 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location step=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/pg23661/12/284/