The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Homesick Hero, sentence 40
Were I not here to paint the rainbow, the storm clouds would never vanish.
Who acts: I, storm clouds · What happens: not be, paint, not vanish · To what, where: rainbow
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Homesick Hero. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I, storm clouds), 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 | Were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 4 here | cop |
| 2 | I | I | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs | 4 here | nsubj |
| 3 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 4 here | advmod |
| 4 | here | here | ADV | PronType=Dem | root | root |
| 5 | to | to | PART | _ | 6 paint | mark |
| 6 | paint | paint | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 4 here | advcl |
| 7 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 8 rainbow | det |
| 8 | rainbow | rainbow | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 paint | obj |
| 9 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 15 vanish | punct |
| 10 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 12 clouds | det |
| 11 | storm | storm | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 clouds | compound |
| 12 | clouds | cloud | NOUN | Number=Plur | 15 vanish | nsubj |
| 13 | would | would | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 15 vanish | aux |
| 14 | never | never | ADV | PronType=Neg | 15 vanish | advmod |
| 15 | vanish | vanish | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 8 rainbow | acl:relcl |
| 16 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 here | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | not is | past | I | here property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | paint | to-infinitive | I not said here | the rainbow | vn image_impression-25.1 «NP V NP.destination»: agent=Agent rainbow=Destination | ||||
| 3 | not vanish | would | the storm clouds | the rainbow not said here | 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: «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 66819 (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/pg66819/12/40/