The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 9, sentence 5

Though how they know I cannot tell you, as nobody has ever seen it.

Who acts: mortals, I, nobody · What happens: know, not tell, see · To what, where: you, house · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 9. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (mortals, I, nobody), 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	Though	though	SCONJ	_	4 know	mark
2	how	how	ADV	PronType=Int	4 know	advmod
3	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	4 know	nsubj
4	know	know	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	8 tell	advcl
5	I	I	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	8 tell	nsubj
6	can	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	8 tell	aux
7	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	8 tell	advmod
8	tell	tell	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
9	you	you	PRON	Case=Acc Person=2 PronType=Prs	8 tell	iobj
10	,	,	PUNCT	_	15 seen	punct
11	as	as	SCONJ	_	15 seen	mark
12	nobody	nobody	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Neg	15 seen	nsubj
13	has	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	15 seen	aux
14	ever	ever	ADV	PronType=Ind	15 seen	advmod
15	seen	see	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	8 tell	advcl
16	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	15 seen	obj
17	.	.	PUNCT	_	8 tell	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	when	roles by
1	know	present	mortals = mortal				vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer
2	not tell speech: assert	can	I		you		vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent you=Recipient
3	see	present · perfect	nobody	house		ever	vn comprehend-87.2-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer it=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/pg3282/9/5/