The Violet Fairy Book, The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars, sentence 194

And they began to laugh at the question, which seemed to them so odd and useless.

Who acts: dogs, question · What happens: begin, laugh, seem · To what, where: question, dogs

This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (dogs, question), 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	And	and	CCONJ	_	3 began	cc
2	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	3 began	nsubj
3	began	begin	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	to	to	PART	_	5 laugh	mark
5	laugh	laugh	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	3 began	xcomp
6	at	at	ADP	_	8 question	case
7	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	8 question	det
8	question	question	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 laugh	obl
9	,	,	PUNCT	_	11 seemed	punct
10	which	which	PRON	PronType=Rel	11 seemed	nsubj
11	seemed	seem	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	8 question	acl:relcl
12	to	to	ADP	_	13 them	case
13	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	11 seemed	obl
14	so	so	ADV	_	15 odd	advmod
15	odd	odd	ADJ	Degree=Pos	11 seemed	xcomp
16	and	and	CCONJ	_	17 useless	cc
17	useless	useless	ADJ	Degree=Pos	15 odd	conj
18	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 began	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	to whom	where	other	roles by
1	begin	past	dogs = dog				vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality
2	laugh	to-infinitive	dogs = dog not said here		the question		vn nonverbal_expression-40.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	seem	past	the question	dogs = dog		odd property	vn seem-109-1-1-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=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/pg641/4/194/