The Yellow Fairy Book, The Dragon and His Grandmother, sentence 28
An old woman passed by, and asked them why they were so sad.
Who acts: old woman, carriages · What happens: pass by, ask, be · To what, where: carriages
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 (old woman, carriages), 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 | An | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 3 woman | det |
| 2 | old | old | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 3 woman | amod |
| 3 | woman | woman | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 passed | nsubj |
| 4 | passed | pass | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | root | root |
| 5 | by | by | ADP | _ | 4 passed | obl |
| 6 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 8 asked | punct |
| 7 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 8 asked | cc |
| 8 | asked | ask | VERB | Mood=Ind Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 4 passed | conj |
| 9 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 8 asked | obj |
| 10 | why | why | ADV | PronType=Int | 14 sad | advmod |
| 11 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 14 sad | nsubj |
| 12 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 14 sad | cop |
| 13 | so | so | ADV | _ | 14 sad | advmod |
| 14 | sad | sad | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 8 asked | ccomp |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 passed | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | pass by | participle | a old woman | vn occur-48.3-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | |||||
| 2 | ask speech: ask | past | a old woman not said here | carriages = carriage | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent they=Recipient | ||||
| 3 | is | past | carriages = carriage | sad property | 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/pg640/9/28/