The Green Fairy Book, The White Snake, sentence 35
Why, we can’t even fly yet; what can we do but die of hunger?’
Who acts: we · What happens: not fly, do, die
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 (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 | Why | why | ADV | PronType=Int | 7 fly | advmod |
| 2 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 1 Why | punct |
| 3 | we | we | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs | 7 fly | nsubj |
| 4 | ca | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 7 fly | aux |
| 5 | n’t | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 7 fly | advmod |
| 6 | even | even | ADV | _ | 7 fly | advmod |
| 7 | fly | fly | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 8 | yet | yet | ADV | _ | 7 fly | advmod |
| 9 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 13 do | punct |
| 10 | what | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 13 do | obj |
| 11 | can | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 13 do | aux |
| 12 | we | we | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs | 13 do | nsubj |
| 13 | do | do | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 7 fly | parataxis |
| 14 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 15 die | cc |
| 15 | die | die | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 13 do | conj |
| 16 | of | of | ADP | _ | 17 hunger | case |
| 17 | hunger | hunger | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 die | obl |
| 18 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 7 fly | punct |
| 19 | ’ | ' | PUNCT | _ | 7 fly | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | not fly | can | we | yet | vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 2 | do | can | we | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Eventuality | |||||
| 3 | die | infinitive | we not said here | of hunger | vn die-42.4-1 «NP V PP.cause»: agent=Patient of hunger=Causer |
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/pg7277/50/35/