The Violet Fairy Book, The Boys With the Golden Stars, sentence 129
The empress was silent, but the princes began to sing the story of their lives.
Who acts: empress, princes · What happens: be, begin, sing · To what, where: story
This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Boys With the Golden Stars. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (empress, princes), 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 | The | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 2 empress | det |
| 2 | empress | empress | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 silent | nsubj |
| 3 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 4 silent | cop |
| 4 | silent | silent | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 5 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 9 began | punct |
| 6 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 9 began | cc |
| 7 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 8 princes | det |
| 8 | princes | prince | NOUN | Number=Plur | 9 began | nsubj |
| 9 | began | begin | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 4 silent | parataxis |
| 10 | to | to | PART | _ | 11 sing | mark |
| 11 | sing | sing | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 9 began | xcomp |
| 12 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 13 story | det |
| 13 | story | story | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 sing | obj |
| 14 | of | of | ADP | _ | 16 lives | case |
| 15 | their | their | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 16 lives | nmod:poss |
| 16 | lives | life | NOUN | Number=Plur | 13 story | nmod |
| 17 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 silent | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | past | the empress | silent property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | begin | past | the princes | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality | |||||
| 3 | sing speech: express | to-infinitive | the princes not said here | the story of empresses's lives | vn sound_emission-43.2 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location story=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 Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 641 (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/pg641/35/129/