The Red Fairy Book, The Ratcatcher, sentence 7

Neither cats nor dogs, nor poison nor traps, nor prayers nor candles burnt to all the saints—nothing would do anything.

Who acts: cats · What happens: burnt, do · To what, where: prayers, anything

This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Ratcatcher. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (cats), 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	Neither	neither	DET	PronType=Neg	2 cats	det
2	cats	cat	NOUN	Number=Plur	23 do	nsubj
3	nor	nor	CCONJ	Polarity=Neg	4 dogs	cc
4	dogs	dog	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 cats	conj
5	,	,	PUNCT	_	7 poison	punct
6	nor	nor	CCONJ	Polarity=Neg	7 poison	cc
7	poison	poison	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 cats	conj
8	nor	nor	CCONJ	Polarity=Neg	9 traps	cc
9	traps	trap	NOUN	Number=Plur	7 poison	conj
10	,	,	PUNCT	_	12 prayers	punct
11	nor	nor	CCONJ	Polarity=Neg	12 prayers	cc
12	prayers	prayer	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 cats	conj
13	nor	nor	CCONJ	Polarity=Neg	14 candles	cc
14	candles	candle	NOUN	Number=Plur	12 prayers	conj
15	burnt	burnt	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	12 prayers	acl
16	to	to	ADP	_	19 saints	case
17	all	all	DET	PronType=Tot	19 saints	det:predet
18	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	19 saints	det
19	saints	saint	NOUN	Number=Plur	15 burnt	obl
20	—	-	PUNCT	_	21 nothing	punct
21	nothing	nothing	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Neg	23 do	nsubj
22	would	would	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	23 do	aux
23	do	do	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
24	anything	anything	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Ind	23 do	obj
25	.	.	PUNCT	_	23 do	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	burnt	participle		prayers nor candles not said here				to all saints	tree rules
2	do	would	neither cats nor dogs nor poison nor traps nor prayers nor candles	anything					vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent anything=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 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/pg540/32/7/