The Blue Fairy Book, The White Cat, part 1, sentence 78

The elder brothers carried in baskets two such tiny, fragile dogs that they hardly dared to touch them.

Who acts: elder brothers, brothers · What happens: carry, dare, touch · To what, where: baskets, two such tiny fragile dogs, brothers

This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The White Cat, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (elder brothers, brothers), 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	3 brothers	det
2	elder	elder	ADJ	Degree=Pos	3 brothers	amod
3	brothers	brother	NOUN	Number=Plur	4 carried	nsubj
4	carried	carry	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
5	in	in	ADP	_	6 baskets	case
6	baskets	basket	NOUN	Number=Plur	4 carried	obl
7	two	two	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	12 dogs	nummod
8	such	such	ADJ	Degree=Pos	12 dogs	amod
9	tiny	tiny	ADJ	Degree=Pos	12 dogs	amod
10	,	,	PUNCT	_	9 tiny	punct
11	fragile	fragile	ADJ	Degree=Pos	12 dogs	amod
12	dogs	dog	NOUN	Number=Plur	6 baskets	nmod
13	that	that	PRON	PronType=Rel	16 dared	obj
14	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	16 dared	nsubj
15	hardly	hardly	ADV	_	16 dared	advmod
16	dared	dare	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	12 dogs	acl:relcl
17	to	to	PART	_	18 touch	mark
18	touch	touch	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	16 dared	xcomp
19	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	18 touch	obj
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	4 carried	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	carry	past	the elder brothers		baskets two such tiny fragile dogs		vn fit-54.3 «NP V NP PP.location»: agent=Agent in basket=Location
2	dare	past	brothers = brother	two such tiny fragile dogs		hardly property	vn urge-58.1-1 «NP V NP S_ING»: agent=Agent that=Recipient clause=Topic
3	touch	to-infinitive	brothers = brother not said here	brothers = brother			vn contiguous_location-47.8-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Theme they=Co-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/pg503/23/78/