Old Indian Legends, Dance in a Buffalo Skull, sentence 5
Upon the ground the land was pitchy black.
Who acts: land · What happens: be
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 (land), 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 | Upon | upon | ADP | _ | 3 ground | case |
| 2 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 3 ground | det |
| 3 | ground | ground | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 black | obl |
| 4 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 5 land | det |
| 5 | land | land | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 black | nsubj |
| 6 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 8 black | cop |
| 7 | pitchy | pitchy | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 8 black | amod |
| 8 | black | black | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 9 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 8 black | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | past | the land | upon the ground; black property | 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/pg338/11/5/