Just so stories, The Beginning of the Armadillos, sentence 77

‘A Tortoise can’t curl himself up,’ Mother Jaguar went on, ever so many times, graciously waving her tail.

Who acts: Tortoise, curl Mother · What happens: not curl up, go on, wave · To what, where: Hedgehog, tail

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 (Tortoise, curl Mother), 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 curl	punct
2	A	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	3 Tortoise	det
3	Tortoise	tortoise	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 curl	nsubj
4	ca	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	6 curl	aux
5	n’t	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	6 curl	advmod
6	curl	curl	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	11 Mother	compound
7	himself	himself	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs Reflex=Yes	6 curl	obj
8	up	up	ADP	_	6 curl	compound:prt
9	,	,	PUNCT	_	10 ’	punct
10	’	's	PART	_	6 curl	obj
11	Mother	mother	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 went	nsubj
12	Jaguar	Jaguar	PROPN	Number=Sing	13 went	nsubj
13	went	go	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
14	on	on	ADV	_	13 went	advmod
15	,	,	PUNCT	_	19 times	punct
16	ever	ever	ADV	PronType=Ind	19 times	advmod
17	so	so	ADV	_	18 many	advmod
18	many	many	ADJ	Degree=Pos	19 times	amod
19	times	time	NOUN	Number=Plur	13 went	obl:unmarked
20	,	,	PUNCT	_	22 waving	punct
21	graciously	graciously	ADV	_	22 waving	advmod
22	waving	wave	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	13 went	advcl
23	her	her	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	24 tail	nmod:poss
24	tail	tail	NOUN	Number=Sing	22 waving	obj
25	.	.	PUNCT	_	13 went	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	when	other	roles by
1	not curl up	can	a Tortoise	Hedgehog			vn rotate-51.9.1-1 «NP.agent V NP.theme NP.extent»: agent=Agent himself=Theme 's=Extent
2	go on	past	curl Mother		time		vn function-105.2.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
3	wave	gerund	curl Mother not said here	mother's tail		graciously property	vn wink-40.3.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent tail=Patient

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/pg2781/8/77/