The Green Fairy Book, The War of the Wolf and the Fox, sentence 61

Then Simon scratched his head and said, ‘I can’t understand it at all.

Who acts: Simon, I · What happens: scratch, say, not understand · To what, where: head, all · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The War of the Wolf and the Fox. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Simon, I), 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	Then	then	ADV	PronType=Dem	3 scratched	advmod
2	Simon	Simon	PROPN	Number=Sing	3 scratched	nsubj
3	scratched	scratch	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	his	his	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	5 head	nmod:poss
5	head	head	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 scratched	obj
6	and	and	CCONJ	_	7 said	cc
7	said	say	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	3 scratched	conj
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 understand	punct
9	‘	'	PUNCT	_	13 understand	punct
10	I	I	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	13 understand	nsubj
11	ca	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	13 understand	aux
12	n’t	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	13 understand	advmod
13	understand	understand	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	7 said	ccomp
14	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	13 understand	obj
15	at	at	ADP	_	16 all	case
16	all	all	DET	PronType=Tot	13 understand	obl
17	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 scratched	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	when	roles by
1	scratch	past	Simon	Simon's head		then	vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent head=Theme
2	say speech: assert	past	Simon not said here				vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
3	not understand	can	I	head	all		vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Experiencer it=Stimulus

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/pg7277/53/61/