Kaffir folk-lore, The Story of the Bird That Made Milk. II., sentence 5
One year there was a great famine.
Who acts: great famine · What happens: be
This is a sentence of «Kaffir folk-lore» by George McCall Theal, The Story of the Bird That Made Milk. II.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (great famine), 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 | One | one | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 2 year | nummod |
| 2 | year | year | 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 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 7 famine | det |
| 6 | great | great | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 7 famine | amod |
| 7 | famine | famine | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 was | nsubj |
| 8 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 was | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | be | past | a great famine | there | year | 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: «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/pg71335/4/5/