The Blue Fairy Book, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, sentence 146
They placed the coffin on the ground, and he approached it and took off the cover.
Who acts: balls, man · What happens: place, approach, take off · To what, where: coffin, ground, cover
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 (balls, man), 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 | They | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 placed | nsubj |
| 2 | placed | place | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 4 coffin | det |
| 4 | coffin | coffin | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 placed | obj |
| 5 | on | on | ADP | _ | 7 ground | case |
| 6 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 7 ground | det |
| 7 | ground | ground | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 placed | obl |
| 8 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 11 approached | punct |
| 9 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 11 approached | cc |
| 10 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 11 approached | nsubj |
| 11 | approached | approach | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 2 placed | parataxis |
| 12 | it | it | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 11 approached | obj |
| 13 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 14 took | cc |
| 14 | took | take | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 11 approached | conj |
| 15 | off | off | ADP | _ | 14 took | compound:prt |
| 16 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 17 cover | det |
| 17 | cover | cover | NOUN | Number=Sing | 14 took | obj |
| 18 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 placed | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | place | past | balls = ball | the coffin | the ground | vn put-9.1-2 «NP V PP.destination NP»: agent=Agent coffin=Theme on ground=Destination | |||
| 2 | approach | past | man | coffin | vn confront-98 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Theme | ||||
| 3 | take off | past | man not said here | the cover | vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent cover=Theme |
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/pg503/13/146/