The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 7, sentence 101

Would not the good spirits tell him?

Who acts: good spirits · What happens: not tell · To what, where: Carrier · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 7. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (good spirits), 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	Would	would	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	6 tell	aux
2	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	6 tell	advmod
3	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 spirits	det
4	good	good	ADJ	Degree=Pos	5 spirits	amod
5	spirits	spirit	NOUN	Number=Plur	6 tell	nsubj
6	tell	tell	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
7	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	6 tell	iobj
8	?	?	PUNCT	_	6 tell	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	not tell speech: assert	would	the good spirits		Carrier				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: «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3282 (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/pg3282/7/101/