The grateful elephant, Opening, part 13, sentence 73
Better an enemy with sense Than a friend without it, For with the words, “I’ll kill a mosquito!”
Who acts: Buddha · What happens: kill · To what, where: mosquito, Better enemy
This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 13. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Buddha), 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 | Better | good | ADJ | Degree=Cmp | 3 enemy | amod |
| 2 | an | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 3 enemy | det |
| 3 | enemy | enemy | NOUN | Number=Sing | root | root |
| 4 | with | with | ADP | _ | 5 sense | case |
| 5 | sense | sense | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 enemy | nmod |
| 6 | Than | than | ADP | _ | 8 friend | case |
| 7 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 8 friend | det |
| 8 | friend | friend | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 enemy | nmod |
| 9 | without | without | ADP | _ | 10 it | case |
| 10 | it | it | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 8 friend | nmod |
| 11 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 15 words | punct |
| 12 | For | for | ADP | _ | 15 words | case |
| 13 | with | with | ADP | _ | 15 words | case |
| 14 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 15 words | det |
| 15 | words | word | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 enemy | conj |
| 16 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 20 kill | punct |
| 17 | “ | " | PUNCT | _ | 20 kill | punct |
| 18 | I | I | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs | 20 kill | nsubj |
| 19 | ’ll | will | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 20 kill | aux |
| 20 | kill | kill | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 enemy | parataxis |
| 21 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 22 mosquito | det |
| 22 | mosquito | mosquito | NOUN | Number=Sing | 20 kill | obj |
| 23 | ! | ! | PUNCT | _ | 20 kill | punct |
| 24 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 20 kill | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | kill in a quote | future | Buddha | a mosquito | vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent mosquito=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/pg74064/13/73/