Old Indian Legends, Dance in a Buffalo Skull, sentence 22
A light on the plain in the middle of the night was an unusual thing.
Who acts: light · What happens: be · To what, where: unusual thing
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 (light), 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 | A | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 2 light | det |
| 2 | light | light | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 thing | nsubj |
| 3 | on | on | ADP | _ | 5 plain | case |
| 4 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 5 plain | det |
| 5 | plain | plain | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 light | nmod |
| 6 | in | in | ADP | _ | 8 middle | case |
| 7 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 8 middle | det |
| 8 | middle | middle | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 plain | nmod |
| 9 | of | of | ADP | _ | 11 night | case |
| 10 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 11 night | det |
| 11 | night | night | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 middle | nmod |
| 12 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 15 thing | cop |
| 13 | an | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 15 thing | det |
| 14 | unusual | unusual | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 15 thing | amod |
| 15 | thing | thing | NOUN | Number=Sing | root | root |
| 16 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 15 thing | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | past | a light on the plain in the middle of the night | a unusual thing | tree rules |
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/pg338/11/22/