The Red Fairy Book, Brother and Sister, sentence 40

And if brother had but kept his natural form, really it would have been a most delightful kind of life.

Who acts: brother, form · What happens: have, keep, be, form · To what, where: natural form, delightful kind

This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Brother and Sister. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (brother, form), 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	And	and	CCONJ	_	6 kept	cc
2	if	if	SCONJ	_	4 had	mark
3	brother	brother	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 had	nsubj
4	had	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	6 kept	advcl
5	but	but	CCONJ	_	6 kept	cc
6	kept	keep	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
7	his	his	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	9 form	nmod:poss
8	natural	natural	ADJ	Degree=Pos	9 form	amod
9	form	form	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 kept	obj
10	,	,	PUNCT	_	19 kind	punct
11	really	really	ADV	_	19 kind	advmod
12	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	19 kind	nsubj
13	would	would	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	19 kind	aux
14	have	have	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	19 kind	aux
15	been	be	AUX	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	19 kind	cop
16	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	19 kind	det
17	most	most	ADV	Degree=Sup	18 delightful	advmod
18	delightful	delightful	ADJ	Degree=Pos	19 kind	amod
19	kind	kind	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 kept	conj
20	of	of	ADP	_	21 life	case
21	life	life	NOUN	Number=Sing	19 kind	nmod
22	.	.	PUNCT	_	6 kept	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	have a condition, not said to happen	past	brother			vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent
2	keep	past		Brother's natural form		vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent form=Theme
3	is a	would · perfect	form	a delightful kind	of life	tree rules
4	form		Brother			nom form «communication transitive»: poss=agent

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 Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 540 (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/pg540/10/40/