The Violet Fairy Book, The Story of Halfman, sentence 34
Then she was quite certain the brothers lay sleeping before her, and began to kill them one by one.
Who acts: mistake, brothers · What happens: be, lie, sleep, begin, kill · To what, where: caps
This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Halfman. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (mistake, brothers), 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:pg641:3436): 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 | Then | then | ADV | PronType=Dem | 5 certain | advmod |
| 2 | she | she | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 5 certain | nsubj |
| 3 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 5 certain | cop |
| 4 | quite | quite | ADV | _ | 5 certain | advmod |
| 5 | certain | certain | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 6 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 7 brothers | det |
| 7 | brothers | brother | NOUN | Number=Plur | 8 lay | nsubj |
| 8 | lay | lie | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 5 certain | ccomp |
| 9 | sleeping | sleep | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 8 lay | xcomp |
| 10 | before | before | ADP | _ | 11 her | case |
| 11 | her | she | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 8 lay | obl |
| 12 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 14 began | punct |
| 13 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 14 began | cc |
| 14 | began | begin | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 5 certain | conj |
| 15 | to | to | PART | _ | 16 kill | mark |
| 16 | kill | kill | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 14 began | xcomp |
| 17 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 16 kill | obj |
| 18 | one | one | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 16 kill | obl:unmarked |
| 19 | by | by | ADP | _ | 20 one | case |
| 20 | one | one | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 18 one | nmod |
| 21 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 5 certain | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | past | mistake | then | certain property | tree rules | |||
| 2 | lie | past | the brothers | before mistake | tree rules | ||||
| 3 | sleep | gerund | the brothers not said here | vn snooze-40.4-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 4 | begin | past | mistake not said here | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality | |||||
| 5 | kill | to-infinitive | mistake not said here | caps = cap | one by one obl:unmarked | vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent they=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: 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/pg641/41/34/