The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Graybeard and His Son, sentence 160
Why should he seek to destroy your life?”
Who acts: Iron · What happens: seek, destroy · To what, where: life
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Graybeard and His Son. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Iron), 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 | Why | why | ADV | PronType=Int | 4 seek | advmod |
| 2 | should | should | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 4 seek | aux |
| 3 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 4 seek | nsubj |
| 4 | seek | seek | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 5 | to | to | PART | _ | 6 destroy | mark |
| 6 | destroy | destroy | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 4 seek | xcomp |
| 7 | your | your | PRON | Case=Gen Person=2 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 8 life | nmod:poss |
| 8 | life | life | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 destroy | obj |
| 9 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 4 seek | punct |
| 10 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 4 seek | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | seek | should | Iron | tree rules | |||||
| 2 | destroy not said to happen | to-infinitive | Iron not said here | your life | vn destroy-44 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent life=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/pg66819/4/160/