The Yellow Fairy Book, The Donkey Cabbage, part 3, sentence 81

They came humbly on their knees, and in a few words told him their story.

Who acts: men · What happens: come, tell · To what, where: knees, story, king, few words · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Donkey Cabbage, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (men), 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	They	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	2 came	nsubj
2	came	come	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	humbly	humbly	ADV	_	2 came	advmod
4	on	on	ADP	_	6 knees	case
5	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	6 knees	nmod:poss
6	knees	knee	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 came	obl
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 told	punct
8	and	and	CCONJ	_	13 told	cc
9	in	in	ADP	_	12 words	case
10	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	12 words	det
11	few	few	ADJ	Degree=Pos	12 words	amod
12	words	word	NOUN	Number=Plur	13 told	obl
13	told	tell	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 came	conj
14	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	13 told	iobj
15	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	16 story	nmod:poss
16	story	story	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 told	obj
17	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 came	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	come	past	men = man			men's knees		humbly property	vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme on knee=Location
2	tell speech: assert	past	men = man not said here	men's story	king	a few words			vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent he=Recipient story=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 Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 640 (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/pg640/12/81/