The grateful elephant, Opening, part 11, sentence 36
“I wish that flock of birds never to come back again.”
Who acts: Supremely, birds · What happens: wish, not come back · To what, where: flock
This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 11. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Supremely, birds), 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 | _ | 3 wish | punct |
| 2 | I | I | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs | 3 wish | nsubj |
| 3 | wish | wish | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | that | that | DET | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 5 flock | det |
| 5 | flock | flock | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 wish | obj |
| 6 | of | of | ADP | _ | 7 birds | case |
| 7 | birds | bird | NOUN | Number=Plur | 10 come | nsubj |
| 8 | never | never | ADV | PronType=Neg | 10 come | advmod |
| 9 | to | to | PART | _ | 10 come | mark |
| 10 | come | come | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 5 flock | acl:relcl |
| 11 | back | back | ADV | _ | 10 come | advmod |
| 12 | again | again | ADV | _ | 10 come | advmod |
| 13 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 wish | punct |
| 14 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 3 wish | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | wish in a quote | present | Supremely | that flock | vn wish-62 «NP V NP»: agent=Pivot flock=Theme | ||||
| 2 | not come back in a quote | to-infinitive | birds | that flock not said here | again | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
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/pg74064/11/36/