The Red Fairy Book, Graciosa and Percinet, part 1, sentence 49

When she was ready nobody could have been prettier, but she still could not help looking sad.

Who acts: nurse, nobody · What happens: be, not help, look

This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Graciosa and Percinet, 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 (nurse, nobody), 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	When	when	ADV	PronType=Int	4 ready	advmod
2	she	she	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	4 ready	nsubj
3	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 ready	cop
4	ready	ready	ADJ	Degree=Pos	5 nobody	amod
5	nobody	nobody	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Neg	9 prettier	nsubj
6	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	9 prettier	aux
7	have	have	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	9 prettier	aux
8	been	be	AUX	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	9 prettier	cop
9	prettier	pretty	ADJ	Degree=Cmp	root	root
10	,	,	PUNCT	_	16 help	punct
11	but	but	CCONJ	_	16 help	cc
12	she	she	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	16 help	nsubj
13	still	still	ADV	_	16 help	advmod
14	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	16 help	aux
15	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	16 help	advmod
16	help	help	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	9 prettier	parataxis
17	looking	look	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	16 help	xcomp
18	sad	sad	ADJ	Degree=Pos	17 looking	xcomp
19	.	.	PUNCT	_	9 prettier	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	when	other	roles by
1	is	past	nurse		ready property	tree rules
2	is	could · perfect	nobody		pretty property	tree rules
3	not help	could	nurse	still		vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V NP S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Theme
4	look not said to happen	gerund	nurse not said here		sad property	vn stimulus_subject-30.4 «NP V ADJ»: agent=Stimulus

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/pg540/23/49/