Kaffir folk-lore, The Story of the Bird That Made Milk. II., sentence 56
They would not tell them the cause.
Who acts: children · What happens: not tell · To what, where: cause, others · Speech: someone speaks here
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 (children), 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 | They | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 4 tell | nsubj |
| 2 | would | would | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 4 tell | aux |
| 3 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 4 tell | advmod |
| 4 | tell | tell | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 5 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 4 tell | iobj |
| 6 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 7 cause | det |
| 7 | cause | cause | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 tell | obj |
| 8 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 tell | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | not tell speech: assert | would | children = child | the cause | others = other | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent they=Recipient cause=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/pg71335/4/56/