The Violet Fairy Book, The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy, part 3, sentence 25

‘Fetch quickly nine buffalo skins; smear them well with tar, and lay them on my back.

Who acts: you · What happens: fetch, smear, lay · To what, where: nine buffalo skins, skins, back

This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you), 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 Fetch	punct
2	Fetch	fetch	VERB	Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	quickly	quickly	ADV	_	2 Fetch	advmod
4	nine	nine	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	6 skins	nummod
5	buffalo	buffalo	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 skins	compound
6	skins	skin	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 Fetch	obj
7	;	;	PUNCT	_	8 smear	punct
8	smear	smear	VERB	Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin	2 Fetch	conj
9	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	8 smear	obj
10	well	well	ADV	Degree=Pos	8 smear	advmod
11	with	with	ADP	_	12 tar	case
12	tar	tar	NOUN	Number=Sing	8 smear	obl
13	,	,	PUNCT	_	15 lay	punct
14	and	and	CCONJ	_	15 lay	cc
15	lay	lay	VERB	Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin	2 Fetch	conj
16	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	15 lay	obj
17	on	on	ADP	_	19 back	case
18	my	my	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Sing Person=1 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	19 back	nmod:poss
19	back	back	NOUN	Number=Sing	15 lay	obl
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 Fetch	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	fetch	imperative	you not said here	nine buffalo skins		quickly property	vn get-13.5.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent skin=Theme
2	smear	infinitive	you not said here	skins = skin		with tar; well property	vn spray-9.7-1 «NP V NP.destination PP.theme»: agent=Agent they=Destination with tar=Theme
3	lay	infinitive	you not said here	skins = skin	my back		vn put_spatial-9.2 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent they=Theme on back=Destination

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/pg641/40/25/