The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Unfinished Boat, sentence 66
My wood is soft and pithy; it would never float upon the water.
Who acts: wood, grub · What happens: be, not float · To what, where: water
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Unfinished Boat. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (wood, grub), 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 | My | my | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Sing Person=1 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 2 wood | nmod:poss |
| 2 | wood | wood | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 soft | nsubj |
| 3 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 4 soft | cop |
| 4 | soft | soft | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 5 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 6 pithy | cc |
| 6 | pithy | pithy | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 4 soft | conj |
| 7 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 11 float | punct |
| 8 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 11 float | nsubj |
| 9 | would | would | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 11 float | aux |
| 10 | never | never | ADV | PronType=Neg | 11 float | advmod |
| 11 | float | float | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 4 soft | parataxis |
| 12 | upon | upon | ADP | _ | 14 water | case |
| 13 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 14 water | det |
| 14 | water | water | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 float | obl |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 soft | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | present | My wood | soft property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | be | My wood not said here | tree rules | ||||||
| 3 | not float | would | grub | the water | vn run-51.3.2-2 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme upon water=Trajectory |
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/pg66819/13/66/