The Book of Dragons, Opening, part 7, sentence 96

There was a signpost of silvery snow, and on it in letters of pure ice the children read: THIS WAY TO THE NORTH POLE.

Who acts: signpost, children · What happens: be, read, signpost, letter · To what, where: WAY, NORTH POLE, signpost, silvery snow, pure ice

This is a sentence of «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Opening, part 7. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (signpost, children), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

Checked tree. This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (gutenberg:pg23661:679): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	There	there	PRON	PronType=Dem	2 was	expl
2	was	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	4 signpost	det
4	signpost	signpost	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 was	nsubj
5	of	of	ADP	_	7 snow	case
6	silvery	silvery	ADJ	Degree=Pos	7 snow	amod
7	snow	snow	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 signpost	nmod
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	19 read	punct
9	and	and	CCONJ	_	19 read	cc
10	on	on	ADP	_	11 it	case
11	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	19 read	obl
12	in	in	ADP	_	13 letters	case
13	letters	letter	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 read	obl
14	of	of	ADP	_	16 ice	case
15	pure	pure	ADJ	Degree=Pos	16 ice	amod
16	ice	ice	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 letters	nmod
17	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	18 children	det
18	children	child	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 read	nsubj
19	read	read	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 was	conj
20	:	:	PUNCT	_	22 WAY	punct
21	THIS	this	DET	Number=Sing PronType=Dem	22 WAY	det
22	WAY	way	NOUN	Number=Sing	19 read	obj
23	TO	to	ADP	_	26 POLE	case
24	THE	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	26 POLE	det
25	NORTH	North	PROPN	Number=Sing	26 POLE	compound
26	POLE	Pole	PROPN	Number=Sing	22 WAY	nmod
27	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 was	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	other	roles by
1	be	past	a signpost of silvery snow			there		vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	read	past	the children	this WAY	the NORTH POLE	signpost	in letters of pure ice	vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1 «NP V NP PP.recipient»: agent=Agent way=Topic to pole=Recipient
3	signpost			silvery snow				nom signpost «communication transitive»: of=patient
4	letter			pure ice				nom letter «communication transitive»: of=patient

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: the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg23661/7/96/