The Red Fairy Book, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, sentence 18
It was the little cow-boy driving his herd back to the byre.
Who acts: voice, little cow boy · What happens: be, drive back · To what, where: little cow boy, herd, byre
This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (voice, little cow boy), 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 | It | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 7 boy | nsubj |
| 2 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 7 boy | cop |
| 3 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 7 boy | det |
| 4 | little | little | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 7 boy | amod |
| 5 | cow | cow | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 boy | compound |
| 6 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 5 cow | punct |
| 7 | boy | boy | NOUN | Number=Sing | root | root |
| 8 | driving | drive | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 7 boy | acl |
| 9 | his | his | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 10 herd | nmod:poss |
| 10 | herd | herd | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 driving | obj |
| 11 | back | back | ADV | _ | 8 driving | advmod |
| 12 | to | to | ADP | _ | 14 byre | case |
| 13 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 14 byre | det |
| 14 | byre | byre | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 driving | obl |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 7 boy | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | past | voice | the little cow boy | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | drive back | gerund | the little cow boy not said here | boy's herd | the byre | vn nonvehicle-51.4.2-1 «NP V NP PP.location»: agent=Agent herd=Theme to byre=Trajectory |
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/pg540/2/18/