Kaffir folk-lore, The Story of Sikulume., sentence 20
The boys set off to follow those beautiful birds.
Who acts: boys · What happens: set off, follow · To what, where: beautiful birds
This is a sentence of «Kaffir folk-lore» by George McCall Theal, The Story of Sikulume.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (boys), 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 boys | det |
| 2 | boys | boy | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 set | nsubj |
| 3 | set | set | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | off | off | ADP | _ | 3 set | compound:prt |
| 5 | to | to | PART | _ | 6 follow | mark |
| 6 | follow | follow | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 set | xcomp |
| 7 | those | that | DET | Number=Plur PronType=Dem | 9 birds | det |
| 8 | beautiful | beautiful | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 9 birds | amod |
| 9 | birds | bird | NOUN | Number=Plur | 6 follow | obj |
| 10 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 set | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | set off | past | the boys | tree rules | |||||
| 2 | follow | to-infinitive | the boys not said here | that beautiful birds | vn chase-51.6 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent bird=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/pg71335/9/20/