Just so stories, The Beginning of the Armadillos, sentence 129

‘That was the very thing I was thinking just now,’ said Stickly-Prickly.

Who acts: That, I · What happens: be, think, say · To what, where: thing · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, The Beginning of the Armadillos. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (That, I), 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	_	6 thing	punct
2	That	that	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Dem	6 thing	nsubj
3	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	6 thing	cop
4	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	6 thing	det
5	very	very	ADV	_	6 thing	advmod
6	thing	thing	NOUN	Number=Sing	14 said	ccomp
7	I	I	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	9 thinking	nsubj
8	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	9 thinking	aux
9	thinking	think	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	6 thing	acl:relcl
10	just	just	ADV	_	11 now	advmod
11	now	now	ADV	PronType=Dem	9 thinking	advmod
12	,	,	PUNCT	_	9 thinking	punct
13	’	'	PUNCT	_	6 thing	punct
14	said	say	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
15	Stickly	stickly	ADJ	Degree=Pos	17 Prickly	amod
16	-	-	PUNCT	_	15 Stickly	punct
17	Prickly	prickly	ADJ	Degree=Pos	14 said	xcomp
18	.	.	PUNCT	_	14 said	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	when	other	roles by
1	is a	past	That	the thing			tree rules
2	think speech: other	past · progressive	I	the thing not said here	now		vn wish-62 «NP V NP»: agent=Pivot thing=Theme
3	say speech: assert	past				prickly property	vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent

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/pg2781/8/129/