Kaffir folk-lore, The Story of Five Heads., sentence 3
The people asked him to tell them the news.
Who acts: people · What happens: ask, tell · To what, where: man, news, people · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «Kaffir folk-lore» by George McCall Theal, The Story of Five Heads.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (people), 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 people | det |
| 2 | people | people | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 asked | nsubj |
| 3 | asked | ask | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | him | he | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 3 asked | iobj |
| 5 | to | to | PART | _ | 6 tell | mark |
| 6 | tell | tell | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 asked | xcomp |
| 7 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 6 tell | iobj |
| 8 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 9 news | det |
| 9 | news | news | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 tell | obj |
| 10 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 asked | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ask speech: ask | past | the people | man | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP whether S_INF»: agent=Agent he=Recipient clause=Topic | ||||
| 2 | tell speech: assert not said to happen | to-infinitive | the people not said here | the news | people | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent they=Recipient news=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/pg71335/5/3/