The Green Fairy Book, The Biter Bit, part 3, sentence 126

Helena set to work at once, but she very soon found that what her stepmother had told her to do was an impossibility.

Who acts: Helena, stepmother · What happens: set, work, find, tell, do, be · To what, where: stepmother, HELENA, impossibility · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Biter Bit, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Helena, stepmother), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

Parsed by Mova, not checked by a teacher. This tree is Mova's own parse (the en model, on the CPU, when the site is built); it may be wrong.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	Helena	Helena	PROPN	Number=Sing	2 set	nsubj
2	set	set	VERB	Mood=Ind Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	to	to	PART	_	4 work	mark
4	work	work	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	2 set	xcomp
5	at	at	ADP	_	6 once	case
6	once	once	ADV	NumForm=Word NumType=Mult	4 work	obl
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	12 found	punct
8	but	but	CCONJ	_	12 found	cc
9	she	she	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	12 found	nsubj
10	very	very	ADV	_	11 soon	advmod
11	soon	soon	ADV	Degree=Pos	12 found	advmod
12	found	find	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 set	conj
13	that	that	SCONJ	_	18 told	mark
14	what	what	PRON	PronType=Int	18 told	obj
15	her	her	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	16 stepmother	nmod:poss
16	stepmother	stepmother	NOUN	Number=Sing	18 told	nsubj:pass
17	had	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	18 told	aux
18	told	tell	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	12 found	advcl
19	her	she	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Fem Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	18 told	iobj
20	to	to	PART	_	21 do	mark
21	do	do	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	18 told	xcomp
22	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	24 impossibility	cop
23	an	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	24 impossibility	det
24	impossibility	impossibility	NOUN	Number=Sing	21 do	obj
25	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 set	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	other	roles by
1	set	past	Helena				tree rules
2	work	to-infinitive	Helena not said here				vn employment-95.3 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent at once=Theme
3	find	past	HELENA			soon property	vn declare-29.4-1-1 «NP V what S_INF»: agent=Agent
4	tell speech: assert	past · perfect · passive		HELENA's stepmother	HELENA		tree rules
5	do not said to happen	to-infinitive	HELENA's stepmother not said here				vn act-114-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
6	is a	past		a impossibility			tree rules

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: «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 7277 (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/pg7277/28/126/