The Red Fairy Book, The Enchanted Canary, sentence 49

‘Why should I laugh?’ asked the old man.

Who acts: I · What happens: laugh, ask · To what, where: old man · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Canary. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), 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	‘	'	PUNCT	_	5 laugh	punct
2	Why	why	ADV	PronType=Int	5 laugh	advmod
3	should	should	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	5 laugh	aux
4	I	I	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	5 laugh	nsubj
5	laugh	laugh	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	8 asked	ccomp
6	?	?	PUNCT	_	5 laugh	punct
7	’	'	PUNCT	_	5 laugh	punct
8	asked	ask	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
9	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	11 man	det
10	old	old	ADJ	Degree=Pos	11 man	amod
11	man	man	NOUN	Number=Sing	8 asked	obj
12	.	.	PUNCT	_	8 asked	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	laugh	should	I						vn nonverbal_expression-40.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent
2	ask speech: ask	past			the old man				vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP whether S»: agent=Agent man=Recipient clause=Topic

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/pg540/40/49/