The grateful elephant, Opening, part 12, sentence 107
“But which one of us is the oldest?” they considered.
Who acts: one, oldest · What happens: be, consider
This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 12. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (one, oldest), 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 oldest | punct |
| 2 | But | but | CCONJ | _ | 9 oldest | cc |
| 3 | which | which | DET | PronType=Int | 4 one | det |
| 4 | one | one | NOUN | Number=Sing | 9 oldest | nsubj |
| 5 | of | of | ADP | _ | 6 us | case |
| 6 | us | we | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs | 4 one | nmod |
| 7 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 9 oldest | cop |
| 8 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 9 oldest | det |
| 9 | oldest | old | ADJ | Degree=Sup | 13 considered | nsubj |
| 10 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 9 oldest | punct |
| 11 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 9 oldest | punct |
| 12 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 13 considered | nsubj |
| 13 | considered | consider | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 14 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 13 considered | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is in a quote | present | which one of us | old property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | consider | past | the oldest | greetings = greeting nsubj | vn consider-29.9-1-1 «NP V whether/if S»: 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 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/pg74064/12/107/