The Lilac Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 28, sentence 102

All day long the youth toiled, but he might as well have tried to empty the ocean.

Who acts: youth · What happens: toil, try, empty · To what, where: ocean

This is a sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 28. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (youth), 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	All	all	DET	PronType=Tot	2 day	det
2	day	day	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 toiled	obl:unmarked
3	long	long	ADV	Degree=Pos	6 toiled	advmod
4	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 youth	det
5	youth	youth	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 toiled	nsubj
6	toiled	toil	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	14 tried	punct
8	but	but	CCONJ	_	14 tried	cc
9	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	14 tried	nsubj
10	might	might	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	14 tried	aux
11	as	as	ADV	ExtPos=CCONJ	14 tried	cc
12	well	well	ADV	Degree=Pos	11 as	fixed
13	have	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	14 tried	aux
14	tried	try	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	6 toiled	advcl
15	to	to	PART	_	16 empty	mark
16	empty	empty	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	14 tried	xcomp
17	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	18 ocean	det
18	ocean	ocean	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 empty	obj
19	.	.	PUNCT	_	6 toiled	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	when	other	roles by
1	toil	past	the youth		day	long property	vn run-51.3.2 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	try	might · perfect	youth				vn try-61.1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality
3	empty not said to happen	to-infinitive	youth not said here	the ocean			vn clear-10.3-1 «NP V NP.source»: agent=Agent ocean=Source

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/pg3454/28/102/