Just so stories, How the First Letter Was Written, sentence 140

He could only gasp and point at Taffy.

Who acts: spear · What happens: gasp, point · To what, where: Taffy

This is a sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, How the First Letter Was Written. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (spear), 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	He	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	4 gasp	nsubj
2	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	4 gasp	aux
3	only	only	ADV	_	4 gasp	advmod
4	gasp	gasp	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
5	and	and	CCONJ	_	6 point	cc
6	point	point	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	4 gasp	conj
7	at	at	ADP	_	8 Taffy	case
8	Taffy	Taffy	PROPN	Number=Sing	6 point	obl
9	.	.	PUNCT	_	4 gasp	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	gasp	could	spear						vn manner_speaking-37.3 «NP V»: agent=Agent
2	point	infinitive	spear not said here			Taffy			vn wink-40.3.1 «NP V»: 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/pg2781/9/140/