The Lilac Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 1, sentence 33

They are older than reading and writing, and arose like wild flowers before men had any education to quarrel over.

Who acts: alphabets, men, education · What happens: be, arise, have, quarrel over · To what, where: education

This is a sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (alphabets, men, education), 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	They	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	3 older	nsubj
2	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	3 older	cop
3	older	old	ADJ	Degree=Cmp	root	root
4	than	than	ADP	_	5 reading	case
5	reading	reading	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 older	obl
6	and	and	CCONJ	_	7 writing	cc
7	writing	writing	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 reading	conj
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	10 arose	punct
9	and	and	CCONJ	_	10 arose	cc
10	arose	arise	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	3 older	conj
11	like	like	ADP	_	13 flowers	case
12	wild	wild	ADJ	Degree=Pos	13 flowers	amod
13	flowers	flower	NOUN	Number=Plur	10 arose	obl
14	before	before	SCONJ	_	16 had	mark
15	men	man	NOUN	Number=Plur	16 had	nsubj
16	had	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	10 arose	advcl
17	any	any	DET	PronType=Ind	18 education	det
18	education	education	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 had	obj
19	to	to	PART	_	20 quarrel	mark
20	quarrel	quarrel	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	16 had	xcomp
21	over	over	ADP	_	20 quarrel	compound:prt
22	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 older	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	is	present	alphabets = alphabet		than reading and writing; old property	tree rules
2	arise	past	alphabets = alphabet not said here		like wild flowers	vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
3	have	past	men	any education		tree rules
4	quarrel over	to-infinitive	any education not said here			vn battle-36.4 «NP V»: agent=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: «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3454 (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/pg3454/1/33/