The Blue Fairy Book, The Forty Thieves, sentence 116
Seeing a man, he started back in terror.
Who acts: merchant · What happens: see, start back · To what, where: man, terror
This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Forty Thieves. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (merchant), 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 | Seeing | see | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 6 started | advcl |
| 2 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 3 man | det |
| 3 | man | man | NOUN | Number=Sing | 1 Seeing | obj |
| 4 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 1 Seeing | punct |
| 5 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 6 started | nsubj |
| 6 | started | start | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 7 | back | back | ADV | _ | 6 started | advmod |
| 8 | in | in | ADP | _ | 9 terror | case |
| 9 | terror | terror | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 started | obl |
| 10 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 6 started | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | see | gerund | merchant not said here | a man | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer man=Stimulus | ||||
| 2 | start back | past | merchant | terror | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality |
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/pg503/34/116/