The Yellow Fairy Book, The Grateful Beasts(11), part 2, sentence 84

But although he tried with all his might, he couldn’t cut off the smallest piece.

Who acts: lad · What happens: try, not cut off · To what, where: smallest piece

This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Grateful Beasts(11), part 2. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (lad), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

Checked tree. This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (gutenberg:pg640:1030): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	But	but	CCONJ	_	13 cut	cc
2	although	although	SCONJ	_	4 tried	mark
3	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	4 tried	nsubj
4	tried	try	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	13 cut	advcl
5	with	with	ADP	_	8 might	case
6	all	all	DET	PronType=Tot	8 might	det:predet
7	his	his	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	8 might	nmod:poss
8	might	might	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 tried	obl
9	,	,	PUNCT	_	4 tried	punct
10	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	13 cut	nsubj
11	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	13 cut	aux
12	n’t	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	13 cut	advmod
13	cut	cut	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
14	off	off	ADP	_	13 cut	compound:prt
15	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	17 piece	det
16	smallest	small	ADJ	Degree=Sup	17 piece	amod
17	piece	piece	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 cut	obj
18	.	.	PUNCT	_	13 cut	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	try	past	lad					with lad's might	vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer
2	not cut off	could	lad	the smallest piece					vn stop-55.4-1 «NP V NP.eventuality»: agent=Affector piece=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 Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 640 (public domain in the USA). Tree: the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/15/84/