Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter I, sentence 3

He was told of a powerful gentleman who observed neither Saint’s day nor Sunday.

Who acts: powerful gentleman · What happens: tell, observe · To what, where: News · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter I. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (powerful gentleman), 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	3 told	nsubj
2	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	3 told	aux:pass
3	told	tell	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	root	root
4	of	of	ADP	_	7 gentleman	case
5	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	7 gentleman	det
6	powerful	powerful	ADJ	Degree=Pos	7 gentleman	amod
7	gentleman	gentleman	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 told	obl:agent
8	who	who	PRON	PronType=Rel	9 observed	nsubj
9	observed	observe	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	7 gentleman	acl:relcl
10	neither	neither	DET	PronType=Neg	11 Saint	det
11	Saint	Saint	PROPN	Number=Sing	13 day	nmod:poss
12	’s	's	PART	_	11 Saint	case
13	day	day	NOUN	Number=Sing	9 observed	obj
14	nor	nor	CCONJ	Polarity=Neg	15 Sunday	cc
15	Sunday	Sunday	PROPN	Number=Sing	13 day	conj
16	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 told	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	tell speech: assert	past · passive	a powerful gentleman	News					vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent subject=Recipient
2	observe	past	a powerful gentleman				day		vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: 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: «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/pg2892/2/3/