Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose, Opening, part 3, sentence 32
What may a man do but prove his fate?”
Who acts: man, Gawain · What happens: do, prove, fate · To what, where: fate
This is a sentence of «Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose» by Jessie L. Weston, Opening, 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 (man, Gawain), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.
Mova's own parse. This tree may be wrong.
The tree
The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)
| # | word | lemma | UPOS | features | head | relation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 5 do | obj |
| 2 | may | may | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 5 do | aux |
| 3 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 4 man | det |
| 4 | man | man | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 do | nsubj |
| 5 | do | do | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 6 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 7 prove | cc |
| 7 | prove | prove | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 5 do | conj |
| 8 | his | his | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 9 fate | nmod:poss |
| 9 | fate | fate | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 prove | obj |
| 10 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 5 do | punct |
| 11 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 do | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | do | may | a man | What obj | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Eventuality | ||||
| 2 | prove | infinitive | a man not said here | Gawain's fate | vn deduce-97.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent fate=Theme | ||||
| 3 | fate | Gawain | nom fate «event transitive»: poss=agent |
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: «Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose» by Jessie L. Weston, Project Gutenberg book 66084 (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/pg66084/3/32/