The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Smithy, sentence 111
Travellers’ tales are wondrous, pleasing; but only fools believe them.”
Who acts: tales, fools, Travellers · What happens: be, please, believe, tell · To what, where: tales · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Smithy. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (tales, fools, Travellers), 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 | Travellers | traveller | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 tales | nmod:poss |
| 2 | ’ | 's | PART | _ | 1 Travellers | case |
| 3 | tales | tale | NOUN | Number=Plur | 5 wondrous | nsubj |
| 4 | are | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 5 wondrous | cop |
| 5 | wondrous | wondrous | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 6 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 7 pleasing | punct |
| 7 | pleasing | please | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 5 wondrous | advcl |
| 8 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 12 believe | punct |
| 9 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 12 believe | cc |
| 10 | only | only | ADV | _ | 11 fools | advmod |
| 11 | fools | fool | NOUN | Number=Plur | 12 believe | nsubj |
| 12 | believe | believe | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 5 wondrous | parataxis |
| 13 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 12 believe | obj |
| 14 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 5 wondrous | punct |
| 15 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 wondrous | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | present | Travellers's tales | wondrous property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | please | gerund | Travellers's tales not said here | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer | |||||
| 3 | believe | present | fools | tales = tale | vn admire-31.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer they=Stimulus | ||||
| 4 | tell | Travellers | nom tale «communication intransitive»: 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/pg66819/7/111/