The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Kantele, sentence 36
But the scales of the monster were like iron plates lapping one upon another.
Who acts: scales, iron plates · What happens: be, lap · To what, where: one
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Kantele. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (scales, iron plates), 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 | But | but | CCONJ | _ | 10 plates | cc |
| 2 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 3 scales | det |
| 3 | scales | scale | NOUN | Number=Plur | 10 plates | nsubj |
| 4 | of | of | ADP | _ | 6 monster | case |
| 5 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 6 monster | det |
| 6 | monster | monster | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 scales | nmod |
| 7 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 10 plates | cop |
| 8 | like | like | ADP | _ | 10 plates | case |
| 9 | iron | iron | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 plates | compound |
| 10 | plates | plate | NOUN | Number=Plur | root | root |
| 11 | lapping | lap | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 10 plates | acl |
| 12 | one | one | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 11 lapping | obj |
| 13 | upon | upon | ADP | _ | 14 another | case |
| 14 | another | another | DET | PronType=Ind | 12 one | nmod |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 10 plates | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | past | the scales of the monster | like iron plates | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | lap | gerund | iron plates not said here | one | upon another | vn chew-39.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent one=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/pg66819/34/36/