The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Maid of Beauty, sentence 52
Can you split a hair with a knife which has no edge?
Who acts: you, knife · What happens: split, have · To what, where: hair, edge
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Maid of Beauty. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, 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 | Can | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 3 split | aux |
| 2 | you | you | PRON | Case=Nom Person=2 PronType=Prs | 3 split | nsubj |
| 3 | split | split | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 4 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 5 hair | det |
| 5 | hair | hair | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 split | obj |
| 6 | with | with | ADP | _ | 8 knife | case |
| 7 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 8 knife | det |
| 8 | knife | knife | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 split | obl |
| 9 | which | which | PRON | PronType=Rel | 10 has | nsubj |
| 10 | has | have | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 8 knife | acl:relcl |
| 11 | no | no | DET | PronType=Neg | 12 edge | det |
| 12 | edge | edge | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 has | obj |
| 13 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 3 split | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | split | can | you | a hair | with a knife | vn break-45.1 «NP V NP PP.instrument»: agent=Agent hair=Patient with knife=Instrument | |||
| 2 | have | present | a knife | no edge | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent edge=Patient |
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/pg66819/3/52/