Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter IV, sentence 31

There was a way and the magicians told him of it.

Who acts: way, magicians · What happens: be, tell · To what, where: way · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter IV. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (way, magicians), 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	There	there	PRON	PronType=Dem	2 was	expl
2	was	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	4 way	det
4	way	way	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 was	nsubj
5	and	and	CCONJ	_	8 told	cc
6	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	7 magicians	det
7	magicians	magician	NOUN	Number=Plur	8 told	nsubj
8	told	tell	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 was	conj
9	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	8 told	iobj
10	of	of	ADP	_	11 it	case
11	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	8 told	obl
12	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 was	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	be	past	a way			there			vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	tell speech: assert	past	the magicians		way			of truth	vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent he=Recipient

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/pg2892/65/31/