The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Wicked Hornet, sentence 20
Older still was Water, terrible in strength but, when not aroused, as gentle as a mother’s caress.
Who acts: mother · What happens: be, not arouse, caress · To what, where: Water
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Wicked Hornet. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (mother), 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 | Older | old | ADJ | Degree=Cmp | root | root |
| 2 | still | still | ADV | _ | 4 Water | advmod |
| 3 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 4 Water | cop |
| 4 | Water | Water | PROPN | Number=Sing | 1 Older | obl |
| 5 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 6 terrible | punct |
| 6 | terrible | terrible | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 1 Older | conj |
| 7 | in | in | ADP | _ | 8 strength | case |
| 8 | strength | strength | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 terrible | obl |
| 9 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 13 aroused | cc |
| 10 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 13 aroused | punct |
| 11 | when | when | ADV | PronType=Int | 13 aroused | advmod |
| 12 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 13 aroused | advmod |
| 13 | aroused | arouse | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 6 terrible | conj |
| 14 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 16 gentle | punct |
| 15 | as | as | ADP | _ | 16 gentle | case |
| 16 | gentle | gentle | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 13 aroused | conj |
| 17 | as | as | ADP | _ | 21 caress | case |
| 18 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 19 mother | det |
| 19 | mother | mother | NOUN | Number=Sing | 21 caress | nmod:poss |
| 20 | ’s | 's | PART | _ | 19 mother | case |
| 21 | caress | caress | NOUN | Number=Sing | 16 gentle | obl |
| 22 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 1 Older | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | past | Water | still | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | not arouse | participle | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer | ||||||
| 4 | caress | a mother | nom caress «act transitive»: poss=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/pg66819/5/20/