Japanese Fairy Tales, by Yei Theodora Ozaki, sentence 863
The ordinary span of a man’s life is very short.” He wondered whether it were possible, by living simply and frugally henceforth, to prolong his life as long as he wished.
Who acts: ordinary span, man · What happens: be, wonder, live, prolong, wish · To what, where: life · 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 (ordinary span, man), 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 | 3 span | det |
| 2 | ordinary | ordinary | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 3 span | amod |
| 3 | span | span | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 short | nsubj |
| 4 | of | of | ADP | _ | 8 life | case |
| 5 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 6 man | det |
| 6 | man | man | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 life | nmod:poss |
| 7 | ’s | 's | PART | _ | 6 man | case |
| 8 | life | life | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 span | nmod |
| 9 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 11 short | cop |
| 10 | very | very | ADV | _ | 11 short | advmod |
| 11 | short | short | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 12 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 11 short | punct |
| 13 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 11 short | punct |
| 14 | He | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 15 wondered | nsubj |
| 15 | wondered | wonder | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 11 short | parataxis |
| 16 | whether | whether | SCONJ | _ | 19 possible | mark |
| 17 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 19 possible | expl |
| 18 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 19 possible | cop |
| 19 | possible | possible | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 15 wondered | ccomp |
| 20 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 22 living | punct |
| 21 | by | by | SCONJ | _ | 22 living | mark |
| 22 | living | live | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 19 possible | advcl |
| 23 | simply | simply | ADV | _ | 22 living | advmod |
| 24 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 25 frugally | cc |
| 25 | frugally | frugally | ADV | _ | 23 simply | conj |
| 26 | henceforth | henceforth | ADV | _ | 22 living | advmod |
| 27 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 29 prolong | punct |
| 28 | to | to | PART | _ | 29 prolong | mark |
| 29 | prolong | prolong | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 19 possible | csubj |
| 30 | his | his | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 31 life | nmod:poss |
| 31 | life | life | NOUN | Number=Sing | 29 prolong | obj |
| 32 | as | as | ADV | _ | 33 long | advmod |
| 33 | long | long | ADV | Degree=Pos | 29 prolong | advmod |
| 34 | as | as | SCONJ | _ | 36 wished | mark |
| 35 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 36 wished | nsubj |
| 36 | wished | wish | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 33 long | advcl |
| 37 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 15 wondered | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | present | the ordinary span of a man's life | short property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | wonder speech: ask in a quote | past | man | vn care-88.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer | |||||
| 3 | is in a quote | past | possible property | tree rules | |||||
| 4 | live in a quote | gerund | henceforth, simply property | vn exist-47.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | |||||
| 5 | prolong in a quote | to-infinitive | man's life | long property | vn sustain-55.6 «NP V NP PP.instrument»: agent=Agent life=Theme | ||||
| 6 | wish in a quote | past | man | vn wish-62 «NP V for NP S_INF»: agent=Pivot |
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:pg4018:863.
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/pg4018/863/