The Green Fairy Book, The Story of Caliph Stork, sentence 94

But flying was not quite an easy matter, for the two storks had had but little practice as yet.

Who acts: two storks · What happens: fly, not be, have · To what, where: flying easy matter

This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Caliph Stork. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (two storks), 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	But	but	CCONJ	_	8 matter	cc
2	flying	fly	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	8 matter	amod
3	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	8 matter	cop
4	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	8 matter	advmod
5	quite	quite	ADV	_	8 matter	advmod
6	an	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	8 matter	det
7	easy	easy	ADJ	Degree=Pos	8 matter	amod
8	matter	matter	NOUN	Number=Sing	root	root
9	,	,	PUNCT	_	15 had	punct
10	for	for	SCONJ	_	15 had	mark
11	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	13 storks	det
12	two	two	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	13 storks	nummod
13	storks	stork	NOUN	Number=Plur	15 had	nsubj
14	had	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	15 had	aux
15	had	have	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	8 matter	conj
16	but	but	CCONJ	_	18 practice	cc
17	little	little	ADJ	Degree=Pos	18 practice	amod
18	practice	practice	NOUN	Number=Sing	15 had	conj
19	as	as	ADP	_	20 yet	case
20	yet	yet	ADV	_	15 had	obl
21	.	.	PUNCT	_	8 matter	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	roles by
1	fly	gerund			vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	not is a	past		a flying easy matter	tree rules
3	have	past · perfect	the two storks		vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent

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/pg7277/7/94/