Hawaiian Historical Legends, Maui the Polynesian, sentence 40
They were able to stand with the sky resting on their shoulders.
Who acts: Islanders, sky · What happens: be, stand, rest · To what, where: shoulders
This is a sentence of «Hawaiian Historical Legends» by W. D. Westervelt, Maui the Polynesian. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Islanders, sky), 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 | They | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 3 able | nsubj |
| 2 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 able | cop |
| 3 | able | able | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 4 | to | to | PART | _ | 5 stand | mark |
| 5 | stand | stand | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 able | xcomp |
| 6 | with | with | ADP | _ | 8 sky | case |
| 7 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 8 sky | det |
| 8 | sky | sky | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 stand | obl |
| 9 | resting | rest | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 8 sky | acl |
| 10 | on | on | ADP | _ | 12 shoulders | case |
| 11 | their | their | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 12 shoulders | nmod:poss |
| 12 | shoulders | shoulder | NOUN | Number=Plur | 9 resting | obl |
| 13 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 able | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | past | Islanders = islander | able property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | stand | to-infinitive | Islanders = islander not said here | with the sky | vn assuming_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent | ||||
| 3 | rest | gerund | the sky not said here | Islanders's shoulders | vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme on shoulder=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/pg66357/2/40/