The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Weeping Ship, sentence 40
“What can it be?” asked the Smith.
Who acts: horse, Smith · What happens: be, ask · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Weeping Ship. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (horse, Smith), 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 | _ | 5 be | punct |
| 2 | What | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 5 be | obj |
| 3 | can | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 5 be | aux |
| 4 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 5 be | nsubj |
| 5 | be | be | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 8 asked | ccomp |
| 6 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 5 be | punct |
| 7 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 be | punct |
| 8 | asked | ask | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 9 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 10 Smith | det |
| 10 | Smith | Smith | PROPN | Number=Sing | 8 asked | obj |
| 11 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 8 asked | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | can in a quote | can | horse | What obj | vn representation-110.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Pivot what=Theme | ||||
| 2 | ask speech: ask | past | the Smith | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V how S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
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/pg66819/33/40/