Just so stories, The Crab That Played With the Sea, sentence 8

One by one he took all the beasts and birds and fishes and told them what to play at.

Who acts: One · What happens: take, tell, play · To what, where: beasts · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, The Crab That Played With the Sea. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (One), 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	One	one	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	5 took	nsubj
2	by	by	ADP	_	3 one	case
3	one	one	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	1 One	nmod
4	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	5 took	nsubj
5	took	take	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
6	all	all	DET	PronType=Tot	8 beasts	det:predet
7	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	8 beasts	det
8	beasts	beast	NOUN	Number=Plur	5 took	obj
9	and	and	CCONJ	_	10 birds	cc
10	birds	bird	NOUN	Number=Plur	8 beasts	conj
11	and	and	CCONJ	_	12 fishes	cc
12	fishes	fish	NOUN	Number=Plur	8 beasts	conj
13	and	and	CCONJ	_	14 told	cc
14	told	tell	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	5 took	conj
15	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	14 told	iobj
16	what	what	PRON	PronType=Int	18 play	obj
17	to	to	PART	_	18 play	mark
18	play	play	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	14 told	ccomp
19	at	at	ADP	_	18 play	obl
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 took	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	roles by
1	take	past	One by one	all beasts and birds and fishes		vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent beast=Theme
2	tell speech: assert	past	One by one not said here		beasts = beast	vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP S_INF»: agent=Agent they=Recipient clause=Topic
3	play not said to happen	to-infinitive				vn use-105.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=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: «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/pg2781/11/8/