The Violet Fairy Book, The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy, part 1, sentence 18

‘Tell us what is wrong: and though we are not boys, we are not quite useless!’

Who acts: you, we, boys · What happens: tell, be, not be · To what, where: us, boys · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, we, boys), 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	_	2 Tell	punct
2	Tell	tell	VERB	Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	us	we	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs	2 Tell	iobj
4	what	what	PRON	PronType=Int	6 wrong	nsubj
5	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	6 wrong	cop
6	wrong	wrong	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 Tell	ccomp
7	:	:	PUNCT	_	19 useless	punct
8	and	and	CCONJ	_	19 useless	cc
9	though	though	SCONJ	_	13 boys	mark
10	we	we	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs	13 boys	nsubj
11	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	13 boys	cop
12	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	13 boys	advmod
13	boys	boy	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 useless	nsubj
14	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 boys	punct
15	we	we	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs	19 useless	nsubj
16	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	19 useless	cop
17	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	19 useless	advmod
18	quite	quite	ADV	_	19 useless	advmod
19	useless	useless	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 Tell	ccomp
20	!	!	PUNCT	_	2 Tell	punct
21	’	'	PUNCT	_	2 Tell	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	other	roles by
1	tell speech: assert	imperative	you not said here		us		vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent we=Recipient
2	is	present				wrong property	tree rules
3	not is a	present	we	boys			tree rules
4	not is	present	boys			useless 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 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/pg641/38/18/