The Red Fairy Book, The Nettle Spinner, sentence 140
He seemed in a desperate condition, but he got neither better nor worse.
Who acts: death · What happens: seem, get
This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Nettle Spinner. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (death), 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 | He | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 seemed | nsubj |
| 2 | seemed | seem | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | in | in | ADP | _ | 6 condition | case |
| 4 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 6 condition | det |
| 5 | desperate | desperate | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 6 condition | amod |
| 6 | condition | condition | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 seemed | obl |
| 7 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 10 got | punct |
| 8 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 10 got | cc |
| 9 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 10 got | nsubj |
| 10 | got | get | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 2 seemed | conj |
| 11 | neither | neither | ADV | _ | 10 got | advmod |
| 12 | better | good | ADJ | Degree=Cmp | 10 got | xcomp |
| 13 | nor | nor | CCONJ | Polarity=Neg | 14 worse | cc |
| 14 | worse | bad | ADJ | Degree=Cmp | 12 better | conj |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 seemed | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | seem | past | death | in a desperate condition | vn seem-109-1-1-1 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Theme in condition=Attribute | ||||
| 2 | get | past | death | good, neither property | vn comprehend-87.2-1 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Experiencer |
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/pg540/42/140/