Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter VII, sentence 30

But no magician could tell it, nor did they try to.

Who acts: magician, magicians · What happens: tell, try · To what, where: back · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter VII. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (magician, 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	But	but	CCONJ	_	5 tell	cc
2	no	no	DET	PronType=Neg	3 magician	det
3	magician	magician	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 tell	nsubj
4	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	5 tell	aux
5	tell	tell	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
6	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	5 tell	obj
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	11 try	punct
8	nor	nor	CCONJ	Polarity=Neg	11 try	cc
9	did	do	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	11 try	aux
10	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	11 try	nsubj
11	try	try	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	5 tell	parataxis
12	to	to	PART	_	11 try	xcomp
13	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 tell	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	tell speech: assert	could	no magician		back				vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent it=Recipient
2	try	past · do-support	magicians = magician						vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer

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/pg2892/68/30/