The Blue Fairy Book, Why the Sea Is Salt, sentence 55

He asked if it could make salt.

Who acts: mill, skipper · What happens: ask, make · To what, where: salt

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 (mill, skipper), 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	He	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	2 asked	nsubj
2	asked	ask	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	if	if	SCONJ	_	6 make	mark
4	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	6 make	nsubj
5	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	6 make	aux
6	make	make	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	2 asked	ccomp
7	salt	salt	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 make	obj
8	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 asked	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	ask speech: ask	past	mill						vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V how S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
2	make a condition, not said to happen	could	skipper	salt					vn build-26.1-1 «NP.material V NP»: agent=Material salt=Product

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/pg503/20/55/