Old Indian Legends, Iktomi and the Fawn, sentence 115
They poked their noses at him trying to know who he was.
Who acts: comrades, Iktomi · What happens: poke, try, know, be · To what, where: noses · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Iktomi and the Fawn. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (comrades, Iktomi), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.
Checked tree. This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (gutenberg:pg338:459): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.
The tree
The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)
| # | word | lemma | UPOS | features | head | relation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | They | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 poked | nsubj |
| 2 | poked | poke | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | their | their | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 4 noses | nmod:poss |
| 4 | noses | nose | NOUN | Number=Plur | 2 poked | obj |
| 5 | at | at | ADP | _ | 6 him | case |
| 6 | him | he | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 poked | obl |
| 7 | trying | try | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 2 poked | advcl |
| 8 | to | to | PART | _ | 9 know | mark |
| 9 | know | know | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 7 trying | xcomp |
| 10 | who | who | PRON | PronType=Int | 9 know | ccomp |
| 11 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 10 who | nsubj |
| 12 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 10 who | cop |
| 13 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 poked | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | poke | past | comrades = comrade | comrades's noses | at Iktomi | vn poke-19-1-1-1 «NP V NP.instrument PP.theme»: agent=Agent nose=Instrument at he=Theme | |||
| 2 | try | gerund | comrades = comrade not said here | vn try-61.1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality | |||||
| 3 | know not said to happen | to-infinitive | comrades = comrade not said here | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer | |||||
| 4 | is a | past | Iktomi | 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: the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.
This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg338/6/115/