The Blue Fairy Book, Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess, sentence 53

They used to tell the Queen, my mother, that it was so.

Who acts: tales, tongue · What happens: use, tell, be · To what, where: mother, Queen · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (tales, tongue), 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 used	nsubj
2	used	use	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	to	to	PART	_	4 tell	mark
4	tell	tell	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	2 used	xcomp
5	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	6 Queen	det
6	Queen	Queen	PROPN	Number=Sing	4 tell	obj
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	9 mother	punct
8	my	my	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Sing Person=1 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	9 mother	nmod:poss
9	mother	mother	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 tell	obl
10	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 was	punct
11	that	that	SCONJ	_	13 was	mark
12	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	13 was	nsubj
13	was	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 tell	advcl
14	so	so	ADV	_	13 was	advmod
15	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 used	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	roles by
1	use	past	tales = tale			vn use-105.1 «NP V NP S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality
2	tell speech: assert	to-infinitive	tales = tale not said here	my mother	the Queen	vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent queen=Recipient
3	be	past	tongue			vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=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/pg503/3/53/