The Green Fairy Book, The Three Snake-leaves, sentence 1

There was once a poor man who could no longer afford to keep his only son at home.

Who acts: poor man · What happens: be, afford, keep · To what, where: only son, home

This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Three Snake-leaves. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (poor man), 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	There	there	PRON	PronType=Dem	2 was	expl
2	was	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	once	once	ADV	NumForm=Word NumType=Mult	2 was	advmod
4	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	6 man	det
5	poor	poor	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 man	amod
6	man	man	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 was	nsubj
7	who	who	PRON	PronType=Rel	11 afford	nsubj
8	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	11 afford	aux
9	no	no	ADV	_	10 longer	advmod
10	longer	long	ADV	Degree=Cmp	11 afford	advmod
11	afford	afford	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	6 man	acl:relcl
12	to	to	PART	_	13 keep	mark
13	keep	keep	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	11 afford	xcomp
14	his	his	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	16 son	nmod:poss
15	only	only	ADJ	Degree=Pos	16 son	amod
16	son	son	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 keep	obj
17	at	at	ADP	_	18 home	case
18	home	home	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 keep	obl
19	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 was	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	be	past	a poor man		there	once property	vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	afford	could	a poor man			long property	tree rules
3	keep	to-infinitive	a poor man not said here	man's only son	home		vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP PP.location»: agent=Agent son=Theme at home=Location

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/pg7277/46/1/