The Blue Fairy Book, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, sentence 121

“No,” he replied, “it’s quite hopeless; if someone could only tell me how to!”

Who acts: King, shuddering, someone · What happens: reply, be, tell · To what, where: King · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (King, shuddering, someone), 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	“	"	PUNCT	_	6 replied	punct
2	No	no	INTJ	Polarity=Neg	6 replied	discourse
3	,	,	PUNCT	_	2 No	punct
4	”	"	PUNCT	_	2 No	punct
5	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	6 replied	nsubj
6	replied	reply	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	12 hopeless	punct
8	“	"	PUNCT	_	12 hopeless	punct
9	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	12 hopeless	nsubj
10	’s	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	12 hopeless	cop
11	quite	quite	ADV	_	12 hopeless	advmod
12	hopeless	hopeless	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 replied	ccomp
13	;	;	PUNCT	_	18 tell	punct
14	if	if	SCONJ	_	18 tell	mark
15	someone	someone	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Ind	18 tell	nsubj
16	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	18 tell	aux
17	only	only	ADV	_	18 tell	advmod
18	tell	tell	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	12 hopeless	conj
19	me	I	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	18 tell	iobj
20	how	how	ADV	PronType=Int	21 to	advmod
21	to	to	PART	_	18 tell	xcomp
22	!	!	PUNCT	_	12 hopeless	punct
23	”	"	PUNCT	_	6 replied	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	to whom	other	roles by
1	reply speech: express	past	King			vn respond-113 «NP V»: agent=Agent
2	is in a quote	present	shuddering		hopeless property	tree rules
3	tell speech: assert a condition, not said to happen, in a quote	could	someone	King		vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient

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 Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 503 (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/pg503/13/121/