The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Barking Dogs, sentence 101
“Let them bark if it pleases them.”
Who acts: you, dogs, war · What happens: let, bark, please · To what, where: dogs
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Barking Dogs. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, dogs, war), 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 | “ | " | PUNCT | _ | 2 Let | punct |
| 2 | Let | let | VERB | Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 Let | obj |
| 4 | bark | bark | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 2 Let | xcomp |
| 5 | if | if | SCONJ | _ | 7 pleases | mark |
| 6 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 7 pleases | nsubj |
| 7 | pleases | please | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 4 bark | advcl |
| 8 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 7 pleases | obj |
| 9 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 Let | punct |
| 10 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 2 Let | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | let in a quote | imperative | you not said here | dogs = dog | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | bark in a quote | infinitive | dogs = dog not said here | vn animal_sounds-38 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 3 | please a condition, not said to happen, in a quote | present | war | dogs = dog | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus they=Experiencer |
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/pg66819/22/101/