The Violet Fairy Book, The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars, sentence 7
‘What news is there?’ asked the eldest.
Who acts: news, eldest · What happens: be, ask · Speech: someone speaks here
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 (news, eldest), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.
Checked tree. This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (gutenberg:pg641:239): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.
The tree
The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)
| # | word | lemma | UPOS | features | head | relation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ‘ | ' | PUNCT | _ | 4 is | punct |
| 2 | What | what | DET | PronType=Int | 3 news | det |
| 3 | news | news | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 is | nsubj |
| 4 | is | be | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 8 asked | ccomp |
| 5 | there | there | PRON | _ | 4 is | expl |
| 6 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 4 is | punct |
| 7 | ’ | ' | PUNCT | _ | 4 is | punct |
| 8 | asked | ask | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 9 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 10 eldest | det |
| 10 | eldest | eld | ADJ | Degree=Sup | 8 asked | nsubj |
| 11 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 8 asked | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | be | present | what news | there | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 2 | ask speech: ask | past | the eldest | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V how S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
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: the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.
This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg641/4/7/