The Yellow Fairy Book, How to Tell a True Princess, sentence 3
There were plenty of Princesses, but he could not find out if they were true Princesses.
Who acts: plenty, they · What happens: be, not find out · To what, where: true Princesses
This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, How to Tell a True Princess. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (plenty, they), 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 | There | there | PRON | PronType=Dem | 2 were | expl |
| 2 | were | be | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | plenty | plenty | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 were | nsubj |
| 4 | of | of | ADP | _ | 5 Princesses | case |
| 5 | Princesses | princess | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 plenty | nmod |
| 6 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 11 find | punct |
| 7 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 11 find | cc |
| 8 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 11 find | nsubj |
| 9 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 11 find | aux |
| 10 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 11 find | advmod |
| 11 | find | find | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 2 were | conj |
| 12 | out | out | ADP | _ | 11 find | compound:prt |
| 13 | if | if | SCONJ | _ | 17 Princesses | mark |
| 14 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 17 Princesses | nsubj |
| 15 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 17 Princesses | cop |
| 16 | true | true | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 17 Princesses | amod |
| 17 | Princesses | princess | NOUN | Number=Plur | 11 find | ccomp |
| 18 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 were | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | be | past | plenty of Princesses | there | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 2 | not find out | could | plenty | vn learn-14-2-1 «NP V PP.topic»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 3 | is a a condition, not said to happen | past | they | true Princesses | tree rules |
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/pg640/44/3/