Ikom folk stories from Southern Nigeria, Xxix.--why a Python Never Swallows a Tortoise., sentence 25
That night there was heavy rain.
Who acts: heavy rain · What happens: be
This is a sentence of «Ikom folk stories from Southern Nigeria» by Elphinstone Dayrell, Xxix.--why a Python Never Swallows a Tortoise.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (heavy rain), 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 | That | that | DET | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 2 night | det |
| 2 | night | night | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 was | obl:unmarked |
| 3 | there | there | PRON | PronType=Dem | 4 was | expl |
| 4 | was | be | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 5 | heavy | heavy | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 6 rain | amod |
| 6 | rain | rain | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 was | nsubj |
| 7 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 was | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | be | past | heavy rain | there | night | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
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: «Ikom folk stories from Southern Nigeria» by Elphinstone Dayrell, Project Gutenberg book 70959 (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/pg70959/22/25/