The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Slave Boy, sentence 102
It was once my father’s knife, and well it served him in the chase and in the fight.
Who acts: knife · What happens: be, serve · To what, where: knife, slave, chase
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Slave Boy. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (knife), 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 | It | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 7 knife | nsubj |
| 2 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 7 knife | cop |
| 3 | once | once | ADV | NumForm=Word NumType=Mult | 7 knife | advmod |
| 4 | my | my | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Sing Person=1 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 5 father | nmod:poss |
| 5 | father | father | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 knife | nmod:poss |
| 6 | ’s | 's | PART | _ | 5 father | case |
| 7 | knife | knife | NOUN | Number=Sing | root | root |
| 8 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 12 served | punct |
| 9 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 12 served | cc |
| 10 | well | well | ADV | Degree=Pos | 12 served | advmod |
| 11 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 12 served | nsubj |
| 12 | served | serve | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 7 knife | conj |
| 13 | him | he | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 12 served | obj |
| 14 | in | in | ADP | _ | 16 chase | case |
| 15 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 16 chase | det |
| 16 | chase | chase | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 served | obl |
| 17 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 20 fight | cc |
| 18 | in | in | ADP | _ | 20 fight | case |
| 19 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 20 fight | det |
| 20 | fight | fight | NOUN | Number=Sing | 16 chase | conj |
| 21 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 7 knife | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | past | knife | my father's knife | my father nmod:poss; once property | tree rules | |||
| 2 | serve | past | knife | slave | the chase and the fight | well property | vn fit-54.3 «NP V NP PP.location»: agent=Agent he=Value in chase=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: «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/pg66819/29/102/