The Yellow Fairy Book, A Story About a Darning-needle, sentence 49
‘Were they of noble birth, then?’ asked the bit of bottle-glass.
Who acts: Fingers · What happens: be, ask · To what, where: Fingers, bit
This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, A Story About a Darning-needle. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Fingers), 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 | ‘ | ' | PUNCT | _ | 3 they | punct |
| 2 | Were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 they | cop |
| 3 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 11 asked | nsubj |
| 4 | of | of | ADP | _ | 6 birth | case |
| 5 | noble | noble | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 6 birth | amod |
| 6 | birth | birth | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 they | nmod |
| 7 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 6 birth | punct |
| 8 | then | then | ADV | PronType=Dem | 3 they | advmod |
| 9 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 3 they | punct |
| 10 | ’ | ' | PUNCT | _ | 3 they | punct |
| 11 | asked | ask | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 12 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 13 bit | det |
| 13 | bit | bit | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 asked | obj |
| 14 | of | of | ADP | _ | 17 glass | case |
| 15 | bottle | bottle | NOUN | Number=Sing | 17 glass | compound |
| 16 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 15 bottle | punct |
| 17 | glass | glass | NOUN | Number=Sing | 13 bit | nmod |
| 18 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 11 asked | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | past | Fingers = finger | then | of noble birth | tree rules | |||
| 2 | ask speech: ask | past | Fingers = finger | the bit of bottle glass | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent bit=Recipient |
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/pg640/51/49/