Old Indian Legends, Dance in a Buffalo Skull, sentence 18

Tiny little field mice were singing and dancing in a circle to the boom-boom of a wee, wee drum.

Who acts: Tiny little field mice · What happens: sing, dance, boom · To what, where: circle, wee

This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Dance in a Buffalo Skull. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Tiny little field mice), 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	Tiny	tiny	ADJ	Degree=Pos	4 mice	amod
2	little	little	ADJ	Degree=Pos	4 mice	amod
3	field	field	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 mice	compound
4	mice	mouse	NOUN	Number=Plur	6 singing	nsubj
5	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	6 singing	aux
6	singing	sing	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	root	root
7	and	and	CCONJ	_	8 dancing	cc
8	dancing	dance	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	6 singing	conj
9	in	in	ADP	_	11 circle	case
10	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	11 circle	det
11	circle	circle	NOUN	Number=Sing	8 dancing	obl
12	to	to	ADP	_	16 boom	case
13	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	16 boom	det
14	boom	boom	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 boom	compound
15	-	-	PUNCT	_	14 boom	punct
16	boom	boom	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 circle	nmod
17	of	of	ADP	_	19 wee	case
18	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	19 wee	det
19	wee	wee	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 boom	nmod
20	,	,	PUNCT	_	22 drum	punct
21	wee	wee	ADJ	Degree=Pos	22 drum	amod
22	drum	drum	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 boom	conj
23	.	.	PUNCT	_	6 singing	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	roles by
1	sing speech: express	past · progressive	Tiny little field mice			vn sound_emission-43.2 «NP.location V PP.theme»: agent=Location
2	dance	gerund	Tiny little field mice not said here		a circle to the boom boom of a wee and wee drum	vn modes_of_being_with_motion-47.3 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme in circle=Location
3	boom			a wee		nom boom «event transitive»: of=patient

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: «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Project Gutenberg book 338 (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/pg338/11/18/