The grateful elephant, Opening, part 10, sentence 131
It must certainly be that they failed to understand something they heard.
Who acts: It, earth · What happens: be, not understand, hear · To what, where: something
This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 10. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (It, earth), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.
Mova's own parse. This tree may be wrong.
The tree
The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)
| # | word | lemma | UPOS | features | head | relation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | It | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 7 failed | nsubj |
| 2 | must | must | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 7 failed | aux |
| 3 | certainly | certainly | ADV | _ | 7 failed | advmod |
| 4 | be | be | AUX | VerbForm=Inf | 7 failed | cop |
| 5 | that | that | SCONJ | _ | 7 failed | mark |
| 6 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 7 failed | nsubj |
| 7 | failed | fail | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 8 | to | to | PART | _ | 9 understand | mark |
| 9 | understand | understand | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 7 failed | xcomp |
| 10 | something | something | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Ind | 9 understand | obj |
| 11 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 12 heard | nsubj |
| 12 | heard | hear | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 10 something | acl:relcl |
| 13 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 7 failed | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | must | It | earth nsubj; certainly, fail property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | not understand | to-infinitive | something | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Experiencer something=Stimulus | |||||
| 3 | hear | past | earth | vn see-30.1-1-1 «NP V PP.stimulus»: agent=Experiencer |
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 grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Project Gutenberg book 74064 (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/pg74064/10/131/