The Lilac Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 6, sentence 4
May I inquire what the business is?”
Who acts: I, business · What happens: inquire, be
This is a sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 6. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I, business), 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 | May | may | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 3 inquire | aux |
| 2 | I | I | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs | 3 inquire | nsubj |
| 3 | inquire | inquire | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 4 | what | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 3 inquire | obj |
| 5 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 6 business | det |
| 6 | business | business | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 what | nsubj |
| 7 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 4 what | cop |
| 8 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 3 inquire | punct |
| 9 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 3 inquire | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | inquire speech: other | may | I | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 2 | is a | present | the business | 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: «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/pg3454/6/4/