The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Slave Boy, sentence 109
“What can ail the wretched slave boy?”
What happens: ail · To what, where: wretched slave boy
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: 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 | _ | 4 ail | punct |
| 2 | What | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 4 ail | obj |
| 3 | can | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 4 ail | aux |
| 4 | ail | ail | VERB | Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 5 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 8 boy | det |
| 6 | wretched | wretched | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 8 boy | amod |
| 7 | slave | slave | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 boy | compound |
| 8 | boy | boy | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 ail | obj |
| 9 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 4 ail | punct |
| 10 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 4 ail | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ail in a quote | can | the wretched slave boy | What obj | 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/pg66819/29/109/