Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter II, sentence 1
Were his nurses comely or harsh-looking?
Who acts: nurses · What happens: look
This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter II. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (nurses), 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 | Were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 8 looking | aux |
| 2 | his | his | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 3 nurses | nmod:poss |
| 3 | nurses | nurse | NOUN | Number=Plur | 8 looking | nsubj |
| 4 | comely | comely | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 8 looking | compound |
| 5 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 6 harsh | cc |
| 6 | harsh | harsh | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 4 comely | conj |
| 7 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 6 harsh | punct |
| 8 | looking | look | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | root | root |
| 9 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 8 looking | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | look | past · progressive | his nurses | vn stimulus_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus |
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: «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Project Gutenberg book 2892 (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/pg2892/15/1/