The Blue Fairy Book, Why the Sea Is Salt, sentence 10

An old man with a long white beard was standing in the outhouse, chopping Yule logs.

Who acts: old man · What happens: stand, chop · To what, where: outhouse, Yule logs

This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Why the Sea Is Salt. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (old 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	An	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	3 man	det
2	old	old	ADJ	Degree=Pos	3 man	amod
3	man	man	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 standing	nsubj
4	with	with	ADP	_	8 beard	case
5	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	8 beard	det
6	long	long	ADJ	Degree=Pos	8 beard	amod
7	white	white	ADJ	Degree=Pos	8 beard	amod
8	beard	beard	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 man	nmod
9	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	10 standing	aux
10	standing	stand	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	root	root
11	in	in	ADP	_	13 outhouse	case
12	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	13 outhouse	det
13	outhouse	outhouse	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 standing	obl
14	,	,	PUNCT	_	15 chopping	punct
15	chopping	chop	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	10 standing	conj
16	Yule	yule	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 logs	compound
17	logs	log	NOUN	Number=Plur	15 chopping	obj
18	.	.	PUNCT	_	10 standing	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	stand	past · progressive	a old man with a long white beard			the outhouse			vn assuming_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent in outhouse=Location
2	chop	gerund	a old man with a long white beard not said here	Yule logs					vn carve-21.2-2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent log=Patient

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/pg503/20/10/