The grateful elephant, Opening, part 10, sentence 66
“What, pray, can be the cause of this?” they inquired, and discovered the cause.
Who acts: fruits · What happens: pray, be, inquire, discover · To what, where: cause · Speech: someone speaks here
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 (fruits), 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 | “ | " | PUNCT | _ | 9 cause | punct |
| 2 | What | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 4 pray | obj |
| 3 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 4 pray | punct |
| 4 | pray | pray | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 9 cause | parataxis |
| 5 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 4 pray | punct |
| 6 | can | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 9 cause | aux |
| 7 | be | be | AUX | VerbForm=Inf | 9 cause | cop |
| 8 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 9 cause | det |
| 9 | cause | cause | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 inquired | ccomp |
| 10 | of | of | ADP | _ | 11 this | case |
| 11 | this | this | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 9 cause | nmod |
| 12 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 9 cause | punct |
| 13 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 9 cause | punct |
| 14 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 15 inquired | nsubj |
| 15 | inquired | inquire | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 16 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 18 discovered | punct |
| 17 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 18 discovered | cc |
| 18 | discovered | discover | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 15 inquired | conj |
| 19 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 20 cause | det |
| 20 | cause | cause | NOUN | Number=Sing | 18 discovered | obj |
| 21 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 15 inquired | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | pray in a quote | present | the cause | tree rules | |||||
| 2 | is a in a quote | can | the cause | of this | tree rules | ||||
| 3 | inquire speech: other | past | fruits = fruit | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 4 | discover | past | fruits = fruit not said here | the cause | vn discover-84-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent cause=Topic |
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/pg74064/10/66/