The Yellow Fairy Book, The Tinder-box, sentence 83
It was a dark evening, and he could not even buy a light.
Who acts: last, soldier · What happens: be, not buy · To what, where: dark evening, light
This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tinder-box. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (last, soldier), 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:pg640:3322): 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 | It | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 5 evening | nsubj |
| 2 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 5 evening | cop |
| 3 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 5 evening | det |
| 4 | dark | dark | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 5 evening | amod |
| 5 | evening | evening | NOUN | Number=Sing | root | root |
| 6 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 12 buy | punct |
| 7 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 12 buy | cc |
| 8 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 12 buy | nsubj |
| 9 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 12 buy | aux |
| 10 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 12 buy | advmod |
| 11 | even | even | ADV | _ | 12 buy | advmod |
| 12 | buy | buy | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 5 evening | conj |
| 13 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 14 light | det |
| 14 | light | light | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 buy | obj |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 5 evening | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | past | last | a dark evening | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | not buy | could | soldier | a light | vn accept-77.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent light=Theme |
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/pg640/46/83/