Kaffir folk-lore, Story of the Bird That Made Milk. I., sentence 126

The boy said: “We have no father and no mother; rock, be our house.”

Who acts: boy, We · What happens: say, have, be · To what, where: father, house · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Kaffir folk-lore» by George McCall Theal, Story of the Bird That Made Milk. I.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (boy, We), 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	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	2 boy	det
2	boy	boy	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 said	nsubj
3	said	say	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	:	:	PUNCT	_	7 have	punct
5	“	"	PUNCT	_	7 have	punct
6	We	we	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs	7 have	nsubj
7	have	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	3 said	ccomp
8	no	no	DET	PronType=Neg	9 father	det
9	father	father	NOUN	Number=Sing	7 have	obj
10	and	and	CCONJ	_	12 mother	cc
11	no	no	DET	PronType=Neg	12 mother	det
12	mother	mother	NOUN	Number=Sing	9 father	conj
13	;	;	PUNCT	_	14 rock	punct
14	rock	rock	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 said	ccomp
15	,	,	PUNCT	_	18 house	punct
16	be	be	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	18 house	cop
17	our	our	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=1 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	18 house	nmod:poss
18	house	house	NOUN	Number=Sing	14 rock	conj
19	.	.	PUNCT	_	14 rock	punct
20	”	"	PUNCT	_	14 rock	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	say speech: assert	past	the boy		rock and our house ccomp	vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
2	have in a quote	present	We	no father and no mother		vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent father=Patient
3	is a in a quote	infinitive	the boy not said here	our house	our nmod:poss	tree rules

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: «Kaffir folk-lore» by George McCall Theal, Project Gutenberg book 71335 (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/pg71335/3/126/

🌲 Kaffir folk-lore, Story of the Bird That Made Milk. I., sentence 126

The tree

Pragmatics

Kaffir folk-lore, Story of the Bird That Made Milk. I., sentence 126