Old Indian Legends, Dance in a Buffalo Skull, sentence 2
Overhead the stars were twinkling bright their red and yellow lights.
Who acts: Overhead, stars · What happens: twinkle, light · To what, where: bright red lights
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 (Overhead, stars), 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 | Overhead | Overhead | PROPN | Number=Sing | 5 twinkling | nsubj |
| 2 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 3 stars | det |
| 3 | stars | star | NOUN | Number=Plur | 5 twinkling | nsubj |
| 4 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 5 twinkling | aux |
| 5 | twinkling | twinkle | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | root | root |
| 6 | bright | bright | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 11 lights | amod |
| 7 | their | their | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 11 lights | nmod:poss |
| 8 | red | red | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 11 lights | amod |
| 9 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 10 yellow | cc |
| 10 | yellow | yellow | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 8 red | conj |
| 11 | lights | light | NOUN | Number=Plur | 5 twinkling | obj |
| 12 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 5 twinkling | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | twinkle | past · progressive | Overhead | stars's bright red lights | vn light_emission-43.1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent light=Theme | ||||
| 2 | light | stars = star | nom light «phenomenon transitive»: poss=agent |
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/pg338/11/2/