Hawaiian Historical Legends, The Water of Life [1], sentence 26
The birds asked and the brothers said: “This is a war canoe.”
Who acts: birds, brothers, This · What happens: ask, say, be · To what, where: war canoe · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «Hawaiian Historical Legends» by W. D. Westervelt, The Water of Life [1]. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (birds, brothers, This), 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 | The | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 2 birds | det |
| 2 | birds | bird | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 asked | nsubj |
| 3 | asked | ask | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 7 said | cc |
| 5 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 6 brothers | det |
| 6 | brothers | brother | NOUN | Number=Plur | 7 said | nsubj |
| 7 | said | say | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 asked | conj |
| 8 | : | : | PUNCT | _ | 7 said | punct |
| 9 | “ | " | PUNCT | _ | 14 canoe | punct |
| 10 | This | this | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 14 canoe | nsubj |
| 11 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 14 canoe | cop |
| 12 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 14 canoe | det |
| 13 | war | war | NOUN | Number=Sing | 14 canoe | compound |
| 14 | canoe | canoe | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 said | ccomp |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 14 canoe | punct |
| 16 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 14 canoe | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ask speech: ask | past | the birds | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 2 | say speech: assert | past | the brothers | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 3 | is a in a quote | present | This | a war canoe | tree rules |
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/pg66357/4/26/