The Blue Fairy Book, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, sentence 168
The youth seized the axe, cleft the anvil open, and jammed in the old man’s beard.
Who acts: youth · What happens: seize, cleft, jam · To what, where: axe, anvil, beard
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 (youth), 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 | The | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 2 youth | det |
| 2 | youth | youth | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 seized | nsubj |
| 3 | seized | seize | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 5 axe | det |
| 5 | axe | axe | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 seized | obj |
| 6 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 7 cleft | punct |
| 7 | cleft | cleft | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 seized | conj |
| 8 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 9 anvil | det |
| 9 | anvil | anvil | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 cleft | obj |
| 10 | open | open | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 7 cleft | xcomp |
| 11 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 13 jammed | punct |
| 12 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 13 jammed | cc |
| 13 | jammed | jam | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 3 seized | conj |
| 14 | in | in | ADP | _ | 19 beard | case |
| 15 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 17 man | det |
| 16 | old | old | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 17 man | amod |
| 17 | man | man | NOUN | Number=Sing | 19 beard | nmod:poss |
| 18 | ’s | 's | PART | _ | 17 man | case |
| 19 | beard | beard | NOUN | Number=Sing | 13 jammed | obl |
| 20 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 seized | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | seize | past | the youth | the axe | vn obtain-13.5.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent axe=Theme | ||||
| 2 | cleft | infinitive | the youth not said here | the anvil | open property | tree rules | |||
| 3 | jam | participle | the youth not said here | the old man's beard | vn spray-9.7-1-1 «NP V PP.destination»: agent=Theme in beard=Destination |
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/pg503/13/168/