Hawaiian Historical Legends, Laa From Tahiti, sentence 1
When history is told by genealogies, rather than by cycles of years, the time-problem is difficult to solve.
Who acts: time problem · What happens: tell, be, solve · To what, where: history, genealogies · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «Hawaiian Historical Legends» by W. D. Westervelt, Laa From Tahiti. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (time problem), 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 | When | when | SCONJ | _ | 4 told | mark |
| 2 | history | history | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 told | nsubj:pass |
| 3 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 4 told | aux:pass |
| 4 | told | tell | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | root | root |
| 5 | by | by | ADP | _ | 6 genealogies | case |
| 6 | genealogies | genealogy | NOUN | Number=Plur | 4 told | iobj |
| 7 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 11 cycles | punct |
| 8 | rather | rather | ADV | ExtPos=CCONJ | 11 cycles | cc |
| 9 | than | than | ADP | _ | 8 rather | fixed |
| 10 | by | by | ADP | _ | 11 cycles | case |
| 11 | cycles | cycle | NOUN | Number=Plur | 6 genealogies | conj |
| 12 | of | of | ADP | _ | 13 years | case |
| 13 | years | year | NOUN | Number=Plur | 11 cycles | nmod |
| 14 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 20 difficult | punct |
| 15 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 18 problem | det |
| 16 | time | time | NOUN | Number=Sing | 18 problem | compound |
| 17 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 16 time | punct |
| 18 | problem | problem | NOUN | Number=Sing | 20 difficult | nsubj |
| 19 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 20 difficult | cop |
| 20 | difficult | difficult | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 4 told | conj |
| 21 | to | to | PART | _ | 22 solve | mark |
| 22 | solve | solve | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 20 difficult | xcomp |
| 23 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 told | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | tell speech: assert | present · passive | history | genealogies rather cycles of years | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: subject=Recipient genealogy=Topic | ||||
| 2 | is | present | the time problem | difficult property | tree rules | ||||
| 3 | solve | to-infinitive | the time problem not said here | vn discover-84 «NP V how S»: agent=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: «Hawaiian Historical Legends» by W. D. Westervelt, Project Gutenberg book 66357 (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/pg66357/10/1/