Hawaiian Historical Legends, The Alapa Regiment, sentence 249
It was death to stand before a prince or a tabu chief.
Who acts: position · What happens: be, stand · To what, where: death
This is a sentence of «Hawaiian Historical Legends» by W. D. Westervelt, The Alapa Regiment. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (position), 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 | It | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 3 death | nsubj |
| 2 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 death | cop |
| 3 | death | death | NOUN | Number=Sing | root | root |
| 4 | to | to | PART | _ | 5 stand | mark |
| 5 | stand | stand | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 death | acl |
| 6 | before | before | ADP | _ | 8 prince | case |
| 7 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 8 prince | det |
| 8 | prince | prince | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 stand | obl |
| 9 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 12 chief | cc |
| 10 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 12 chief | det |
| 11 | tabu | tabu | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 chief | compound |
| 12 | chief | chief | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 prince | conj |
| 13 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 death | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | past | position | death | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | stand | to-infinitive | before a prince or a tabu chief | vn assuming_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent before prince=Location |
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/pg66357/14/249/