Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Snowdrop, sentence 119
Were they each nothing or something?
Who acts: brothers · What happens: be
This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Snowdrop. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (brothers), 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 | Were | be | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 2 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 1 Were | nsubj |
| 3 | each | each | DET | PronType=Tot | 4 nothing | det |
| 4 | nothing | nothing | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Neg | 1 Were | nsubj |
| 5 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 6 something | cc |
| 6 | something | something | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Ind | 4 nothing | conj |
| 7 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 1 Were | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | be | past | brothers = brother | 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: «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Project Gutenberg book 27200 (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/pg27200/177/119/