Kaffir folk-lore, Story of the Bird That Made Milk. I., sentence 17
You were lazy and didn’t work, and now tell me this falsehood.
Who acts: You · What happens: be, not work, tell · To what, where: falsehood, me · 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 (You), 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 | You | you | PRON | Case=Nom Person=2 PronType=Prs | 3 lazy | nsubj |
| 2 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=2 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 lazy | cop |
| 3 | lazy | lazy | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 4 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 7 work | cc |
| 5 | did | do | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=2 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 7 work | aux |
| 6 | n’t | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 7 work | advmod |
| 7 | work | work | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 lazy | conj |
| 8 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 11 tell | punct |
| 9 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 11 tell | cc |
| 10 | now | now | ADV | PronType=Dem | 11 tell | advmod |
| 11 | tell | tell | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 lazy | parataxis |
| 12 | me | I | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs | 11 tell | iobj |
| 13 | this | this | DET | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 14 falsehood | det |
| 14 | falsehood | falsehood | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 tell | obj |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 lazy | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | past | You | lazy property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | not work | past · do-support | You not said here | vn employment-95.3 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 3 | tell speech: assert | infinitive | this falsehood | me | now | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent i=Recipient falsehood=Topic |
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/pg71335/3/17/