Japanese Fairy Tales, by Yei Theodora Ozaki, sentence 1958
The monkey replied laughingly that he couldn’t afford to lose his liver: it was too precious.
Who acts: monkey, liver · What happens: reply, not afford, lose, be · To what, where: liver · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «Japanese Fairy Tales, by Yei Theodora Ozaki», a book of tales from Project Gutenberg. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (monkey, liver), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.
The tree
The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)
| # | word | lemma | UPOS | features | head | relation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 2 monkey | det |
| 2 | monkey | monkey | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 replied | nsubj |
| 3 | replied | reply | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | laughingly | laughingly | ADV | _ | 3 replied | advmod |
| 5 | that | that | SCONJ | _ | 9 afford | mark |
| 6 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 9 afford | nsubj |
| 7 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 9 afford | aux |
| 8 | n’t | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 9 afford | advmod |
| 9 | afford | afford | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 replied | ccomp |
| 10 | to | to | PART | _ | 11 lose | mark |
| 11 | lose | lose | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 9 afford | xcomp |
| 12 | his | his | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 13 liver | nmod:poss |
| 13 | liver | liver | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 lose | obj |
| 14 | : | : | PUNCT | _ | 18 precious | punct |
| 15 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 18 precious | nsubj |
| 16 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 18 precious | cop |
| 17 | too | too | ADV | _ | 18 precious | advmod |
| 18 | precious | precious | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 3 replied | parataxis |
| 19 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 replied | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | reply speech: assert | past | the monkey | laughingly property | vn say-37.7-1 «NP V how S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | ||||
| 2 | not afford | could | monkey | tree rules | |||||
| 3 | lose | to-infinitive | monkey not said here | monkey's liver | vn succeed-74-3-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent liver=Eventuality | ||||
| 4 | is | past | liver | precious property | 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: «Japanese Fairy Tales, by Yei Theodora Ozaki», Project Gutenberg book 4018 (public domain in the USA). Annotation: the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (mova-tales-silver-en.conllu), Apache-2.0 OR MIT: parsed by Mova, patched by a large language model as teacher under UD validation gates. Sentence gutenberg:pg4018:1958.
The tree: Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18. The frames are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (prag) when this page is built, the tale's sample read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.
See the release 0.3.
This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg4018/1958/