Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter XIII, sentence 31

“Tell me the why of this?” said his servant.

Who acts: servant · What happens: tell, say · To what, where: servant · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter XIII. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (servant), 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	_	2 Tell	punct
2	Tell	tell	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	10 said	ccomp
3	me	I	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	2 Tell	iobj
4	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 why	det
5	why	why	ADV	PronType=Int	2 Tell	advmod
6	of	of	ADP	_	7 this	case
7	this	this	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Dem	5 why	obl
8	?	?	PUNCT	_	2 Tell	punct
9	”	"	PUNCT	_	2 Tell	punct
10	said	say	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
11	his	his	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	12 servant	nmod:poss
12	servant	servant	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 said	obj
13	.	.	PUNCT	_	10 said	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	tell speech: assert in a quote	infinitive			sorrier's servant = servant				vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient
2	say speech: ask	past	sorrier's servant						vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic

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/pg2892/84/31/