Old Indian Legends, Iktomi and the Ducks, sentence 15

Poor Iktomi cannot help being a little imp.

Who acts: Poor Iktomi · What happens: not help, be · To what, where: little imp

This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Iktomi and the Ducks. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Poor Iktomi), 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	Poor	poor	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 Iktomi	amod
2	Iktomi	Iktomi	PROPN	Number=Sing	5 help	nsubj
3	can	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	5 help	aux
4	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	5 help	advmod
5	help	help	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
6	being	be	AUX	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	9 imp	cop
7	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	9 imp	det
8	little	little	ADJ	Degree=Pos	9 imp	amod
9	imp	imp	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 help	obj
10	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 help	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	not help	can	Poor Iktomi						vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent
2	is a	gerund		a little imp					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/pg338/2/15/