The Yellow Fairy Book, The Dragon and His Grandmother, sentence 13

They answered, ‘We are three soldiers, and have deserted because our pay was so small.

Who acts: others, We, pay, our · What happens: answer, be, desert, pay · To what, where: three soldiers

This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Dragon and His Grandmother. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (others, We, pay, our), 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 answered	nsubj
2	answered	answer	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	,	,	PUNCT	_	8 soldiers	punct
4	‘	'	PUNCT	_	8 soldiers	punct
5	We	we	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs	8 soldiers	nsubj
6	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	8 soldiers	cop
7	three	three	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	8 soldiers	nummod
8	soldiers	soldier	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 answered	conj
9	,	,	PUNCT	_	12 deserted	punct
10	and	and	CCONJ	_	12 deserted	cc
11	have	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	12 deserted	aux
12	deserted	desert	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	2 answered	parataxis
13	because	because	SCONJ	_	18 small	mark
14	our	our	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=1 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	15 pay	nmod:poss
15	pay	pay	NOUN	Number=Sing	18 small	nsubj
16	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	18 small	cop
17	so	so	ADV	_	18 small	advmod
18	small	small	ADJ	Degree=Pos	12 deserted	advcl
19	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 answered	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	answer speech: assert	past	others = other			vn reciprocate-112-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
2	is a	present	We	three soldiers		tree rules
3	desert	present · perfect				vn leave-51.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
4	is	past	our pay		small property	tree rules
5	pay		our			nom pay «possession transitive»: poss=agent

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/pg640/9/13/