Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, The Three Brothers, sentence 1

There were, once upon a time, three brothers, and the third was a fool.

Who acts: three brothers, third · What happens: be · To what, where: fool

This is a sentence of «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», The Three Brothers. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (three brothers, third), 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 were	expl
2	were	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	,	,	PUNCT	_	4 once	punct
4	once	once	ADV	NumForm=Word NumType=Mult	2 were	advmod
5	upon	upon	ADP	_	7 time	case
6	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	7 time	det
7	time	time	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 once	obl
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	10 brothers	punct
9	three	three	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	10 brothers	nummod
10	brothers	brother	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 were	nsubj
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	17 fool	punct
12	and	and	CCONJ	_	17 fool	cc
13	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	14 third	det
14	third	third	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 fool	nsubj
15	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	17 fool	cop
16	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	17 fool	det
17	fool	fool	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 were	conj
18	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 were	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	be	past	three brothers			there		once property	vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	is a	past	the third	a fool					tree rules

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: «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», Project Gutenberg book 29672 (public domain in the USA). Tree: Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.

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