The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 8, sentence 16

The family were all much distressed, and begged him to tell them what food he fancied.

Who acts: food · What happens: distress, beg, tell, fancy · To what, where: family, husband, corner · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 8. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (food), 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	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	2 family	det
2	family	family	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 distressed	obl:unmarked
3	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	6 distressed	aux:pass
4	all	all	ADV	_	5 much	advmod
5	much	much	ADV	_	6 distressed	advmod
6	distressed	distress	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	root	root
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	9 begged	punct
8	and	and	CCONJ	_	9 begged	cc
9	begged	beg	VERB	Mood=Ind Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	6 distressed	conj
10	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	9 begged	obj
11	to	to	PART	_	12 tell	mark
12	tell	tell	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	9 begged	xcomp
13	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	12 tell	iobj
14	what	what	PRON	PronType=Int	17 fancied	obj
15	food	food	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 fancied	nsubj
16	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	17 fancied	nsubj
17	fancied	fancy	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	12 tell	ccomp
18	.	.	PUNCT	_	6 distressed	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	roles by
1	distress	past · passive		the family		vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»
2	beg speech: request	past			husband	vn beg-58.2-1-1 «NP V NP S_INF»: agent=Agent he=Recipient clause=Topic
3	tell speech: assert not said to happen	to-infinitive			corner	vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP what S»: agent=Agent they=Recipient clause=Topic
4	fancy	past	food			vn admire-31.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer what=Stimulus

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/pg3282/8/16/