The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Famine, sentence 14
Then from out of the shadows an old man, feeble and tottering, came to meet him.
Who acts: old man · What happens: totter, come, meet · To what, where: shadows, home
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Famine. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (old man), 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 | Then | then | ADV | PronType=Dem | 15 came | advmod |
| 2 | from | from | ADP | _ | 6 shadows | case |
| 3 | out | out | ADP | _ | 6 shadows | case |
| 4 | of | of | ADP | _ | 6 shadows | case |
| 5 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 6 shadows | det |
| 6 | shadows | shadow | NOUN | Number=Plur | 15 came | obl |
| 7 | an | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 9 man | det |
| 8 | old | old | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 9 man | amod |
| 9 | man | man | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 came | nsubj |
| 10 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 11 feeble | punct |
| 11 | feeble | feeble | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 9 man | amod |
| 12 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 13 tottering | cc |
| 13 | tottering | totter | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 11 feeble | conj |
| 14 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 9 man | punct |
| 15 | came | come | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 16 | to | to | PART | _ | 17 meet | mark |
| 17 | meet | meet | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 15 came | xcomp |
| 18 | him | he | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 17 meet | obj |
| 19 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 15 came | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | totter | gerund | a old man not said here | vn body_internal_motion-49.1 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 2 | come | past | a old man | the shadows | then | tree rules | |||
| 3 | meet | to-infinitive | a old man not said here | home | vn meet-36.3-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent he=Co-Agent |
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/pg66819/32/14/