The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 9, sentence 8

Once upon a time there lived a man who had nearly as many children as there were sparrows in the garden.

Who acts: man, sparrows · What happens: live, have, be · To what, where: man, many children

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 (man, sparrows), 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	Once	once	ADV	NumForm=Word NumType=Mult	6 lived	advmod
2	upon	upon	ADP	_	4 time	case
3	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	4 time	det
4	time	time	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 lived	obl
5	there	there	ADV	PronType=Dem	6 lived	advmod
6	lived	live	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
7	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	8 man	det
8	man	man	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 lived	obj
9	who	who	PRON	PronType=Rel	10 had	nsubj
10	had	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	8 man	acl:relcl
11	nearly	nearly	ADV	_	13 many	advmod
12	as	as	ADV	_	13 many	advmod
13	many	many	ADJ	Degree=Pos	14 children	amod
14	children	child	NOUN	Number=Plur	10 had	obj
15	as	as	SCONJ	_	17 were	mark
16	there	there	PRON	PronType=Dem	17 were	expl
17	were	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	6 lived	conj
18	sparrows	sparrow	NOUN	Number=Plur	17 were	nsubj
19	in	in	ADP	_	21 garden	case
20	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	21 garden	det
21	garden	garden	NOUN	Number=Sing	18 sparrows	nmod
22	.	.	PUNCT	_	6 lived	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	live	past		a man	there	time	once property	vn lodge-46 «NP V ADV»: agent=Theme man=Location
2	have	past	a man	many children				vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent child=Patient
3	be	past	sparrows in the garden		there			vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme

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/pg3282/9/8/