Grimms' Fairy Tales, The Little Peasant, sentence 24

Just as they were about to sit down and eat, there was a knocking outside.

Who acts: things, knocking · What happens: sit down, eat, be

This is a sentence of «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, The Little Peasant. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (things, knocking), 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	Just	just	ADV	_	7 sit	advmod
2	as	as	SCONJ	_	7 sit	mark
3	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	7 sit	nsubj
4	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	7 sit	aux
5	about	about	ADV	_	7 sit	advmod
6	to	to	PART	_	7 sit	mark
7	sit	sit	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
8	down	down	ADP	_	7 sit	compound:prt
9	and	and	CCONJ	_	10 eat	cc
10	eat	eat	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	7 sit	conj
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 was	punct
12	there	there	PRON	PronType=Dem	13 was	expl
13	was	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	7 sit	parataxis
14	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	15 knocking	det
15	knocking	knocking	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 was	nsubj
16	outside	outside	ADV	_	15 knocking	advmod
17	.	.	PUNCT	_	7 sit	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	where	other	roles by
1	sit down	past	things = thing		about property	vn assuming_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent
2	eat	present	things = thing not said here			vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	be	past	a knocking	there		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: «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, Project Gutenberg book 2591 (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/pg2591/28/24/