The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Triumph of Music, sentence 5
Her long, crooked fingers trembled nervously, they seemed to be grasping at something invisible.
Who acts: long crooked fingers, fingers · What happens: tremble, seem, grasp · To what, where: something
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Triumph of Music. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (long crooked fingers, fingers), 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 | Her | her | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 5 fingers | nmod:poss |
| 2 | long | long | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 5 fingers | amod |
| 3 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 2 long | punct |
| 4 | crooked | crooked | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 5 fingers | amod |
| 5 | fingers | finger | NOUN | Number=Plur | 6 trembled | nsubj |
| 6 | trembled | tremble | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 7 | nervously | nervously | ADV | _ | 6 trembled | advmod |
| 8 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 10 seemed | punct |
| 9 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 10 seemed | nsubj |
| 10 | seemed | seem | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 6 trembled | parataxis |
| 11 | to | to | PART | _ | 13 grasping | mark |
| 12 | be | be | AUX | VerbForm=Inf | 13 grasping | aux |
| 13 | grasping | grasp | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 10 seemed | xcomp |
| 14 | at | at | ADP | _ | 15 something | case |
| 15 | something | something | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Ind | 13 grasping | obl |
| 16 | invisible | invisible | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 15 something | amod |
| 17 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 6 trembled | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | tremble | past | Dame's long crooked fingers | nervously property | vn modes_of_being_with_motion-47.3 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 2 | seem | past | fingers = finger | vn seem-109-1-1-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Theme clause=Attribute | |||||
| 3 | grasp | to-infinitive · progressive | fingers = finger not said here | something | vn comprehend-87.2-1 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Experiencer |
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/pg66819/35/5/