Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Clerk's Transformation, sentence 11
There could not be a quieter or more steady young man than this clerk.
Who acts: quieter steady young man · What happens: not be
This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Clerk's Transformation. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (quieter steady young man), 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 | There | there | PRON | PronType=Dem | 4 be | expl |
| 2 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 4 be | aux |
| 3 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 4 be | advmod |
| 4 | be | be | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 5 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 11 man | det |
| 6 | quieter | quiet | ADJ | Degree=Cmp | 11 man | amod |
| 7 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 8 more | cc |
| 8 | more | more | ADJ | Degree=Cmp | 6 quieter | conj |
| 9 | steady | steady | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 11 man | amod |
| 10 | young | young | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 11 man | amod |
| 11 | man | man | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 be | nsubj |
| 12 | than | than | ADP | _ | 14 clerk | case |
| 13 | this | this | DET | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 14 clerk | det |
| 14 | clerk | clerk | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 man | nmod |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 be | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | not can | could | a quieter steady young man than this clerk | 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: «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/pg27200/44/11/