Just so stories, How the First Letter Was Written, sentence 155
‘There wasn’t lots of spears.
Who acts: lots · What happens: not be
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 (lots), 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 was | punct |
| 2 | There | there | PRON | PronType=Dem | 3 was | expl |
| 3 | was | be | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | n’t | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 3 was | advmod |
| 5 | lots | lot | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 was | nsubj |
| 6 | of | of | ADP | _ | 7 spears | case |
| 7 | spears | spear | NOUN | Number=Plur | 5 lots | nmod |
| 8 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 was | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | not be | past | lots of spears | there | vn exist-47.1 «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/pg2781/9/155/