The Green Fairy Book, The White Snake, sentence 34

The poor little birds lay on the ground flapping and beating their wings, and shrieked, ‘We poor helpless children, feed ourselves indeed!

Who acts: poor little birds, ground, We · What happens: lay, flap, beat, shriek, child, feed · To what, where: ground, wings, ourselves

This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The White Snake. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (poor little birds, ground, We), 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	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	4 birds	det
2	poor	poor	ADJ	Degree=Pos	4 birds	amod
3	little	little	ADJ	Degree=Pos	4 birds	amod
4	birds	bird	NOUN	Number=Plur	5 lay	nsubj
5	lay	lay	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
6	on	on	ADP	_	8 ground	case
7	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	8 ground	det
8	ground	ground	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 lay	obl
9	flapping	flap	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	8 ground	acl
10	and	and	CCONJ	_	11 beating	cc
11	beating	beat	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	9 flapping	conj
12	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	13 wings	nmod:poss
13	wings	wing	NOUN	Number=Plur	11 beating	obj
14	,	,	PUNCT	_	16 shrieked	punct
15	and	and	CCONJ	_	16 shrieked	cc
16	shrieked	shriek	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	5 lay	parataxis
17	,	,	PUNCT	_	22 children	punct
18	‘	'	PUNCT	_	22 children	punct
19	We	we	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs	22 children	nsubj
20	poor	poor	ADJ	Degree=Pos	22 children	amod
21	helpless	helpless	ADJ	Degree=Pos	22 children	amod
22	children	child	NOUN	Number=Plur	16 shrieked	obl
23	,	,	PUNCT	_	24 feed	punct
24	feed	feed	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	16 shrieked	conj
25	ourselves	ourselves	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs Reflex=Yes	24 feed	obj
26	indeed	indeed	ADV	_	24 feed	advmod
27	!	!	PUNCT	_	5 lay	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	lay	present	the poor little birds		the ground		vn put_spatial-9.2 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent on ground=Destination
2	flap	gerund	the ground not said here				vn body_internal_motion-49.1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	beat	gerund	the ground not said here	birds's wings			vn sound_emission-43.2 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location wing=Theme
4	shriek	past					vn sound_emission-43.2 «NP V»: agent=Theme
5	child		We				tree rules
6	feed	present		ourselves		indeed property	vn feeding-39.7 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent ourselves=Recipient

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/pg7277/50/34/