Just so stories, How the Alphabet Was Made, sentence 231
‘Las means breaking or finishing as well as ending, doesn’t it?’
Who acts: Las · What happens: mean, break, finish, not do · To what, where: ending
This is a sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, How the Alphabet Was Made. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Las), 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 | ‘ | ' | PUNCT | _ | 3 means | punct |
| 2 | Las | Las | PROPN | Number=Plur | 3 means | nsubj |
| 3 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | breaking | break | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 3 means | xcomp |
| 5 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 6 finishing | cc |
| 6 | finishing | finish | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 4 breaking | conj |
| 7 | as | as | ADV | ExtPos=CCONJ | 10 ending | cc |
| 8 | well | well | ADV | Degree=Pos | 7 as | fixed |
| 9 | as | as | ADP | _ | 7 as | fixed |
| 10 | ending | ending | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 finishing | conj |
| 11 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 12 does | punct |
| 12 | does | do | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 3 means | conj |
| 13 | n’t | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 12 does | advmod |
| 14 | it | it | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 12 does | obj |
| 15 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 12 does | punct |
| 16 | ’ | ' | PUNCT | _ | 3 means | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | mean | present | Las | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | |||||
| 2 | break not said to happen | gerund | Las not said here | vn hurt-40.8.3-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Patient | |||||
| 3 | finish | gerund | Las not said here | vn stop-55.4-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality | |||||
| 4 | not do | present | Las not said here | ending | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Eventuality |
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: «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, Project Gutenberg book 2781 (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/pg2781/10/231/