Just so stories, The Beginning of the Armadillos, sentence 130

‘I think scales are a tremendous improvement on prickles--to say nothing of being able to swim.

Who acts: I, scales · What happens: think, be, say, swim · To what, where: tremendous improvement, prickles, nothing · 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 (I, scales), 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 think	punct
2	I	I	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	3 think	nsubj
3	think	think	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	scales	scale	NOUN	Number=Plur	8 improvement	nsubj
5	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	8 improvement	cop
6	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	8 improvement	det
7	tremendous	tremendous	ADJ	Degree=Pos	8 improvement	amod
8	improvement	improvement	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 think	ccomp
9	on	on	ADP	_	10 prickles	case
10	prickles	prickle	NOUN	Number=Plur	8 improvement	nmod
11	--	--	PUNCT	_	13 say	punct
12	to	to	PART	_	13 say	mark
13	say	say	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	3 think	ccomp
14	nothing	nothing	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Neg	13 say	obj
15	of	of	ADP	_	17 able	case
16	being	be	AUX	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	17 able	cop
17	able	able	ADJ	Degree=Pos	14 nothing	amod
18	to	to	PART	_	19 swim	mark
19	swim	swim	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	17 able	xcomp
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 think	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	think speech: other	present	I				vn consider-29.9-2 «NP V how S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Theme
2	is a	present	scales	a tremendous improvement	prickles		tree rules
3	say speech: assert	to-infinitive		nothing			vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent nothing=Topic
4	is	gerund				able property	tree rules
5	swim	to-infinitive					vn run-51.3.2-1 «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: «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/pg2781/8/130/