The grateful elephant, Opening, part 13, sentence 83
A certain wealthy merchant, we are told, had a slave-girl.
Who acts: certain wealthy merchant · What happens: tell, have · To what, where: we, slave girl · Speech: someone speaks here
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 (certain wealthy merchant), 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 | A | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 4 merchant | det |
| 2 | certain | certain | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 4 merchant | amod |
| 3 | wealthy | wealthy | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 4 merchant | amod |
| 4 | merchant | merchant | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 had | nsubj |
| 5 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 4 merchant | punct |
| 6 | we | we | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs | 8 told | nsubj |
| 7 | are | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=1 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 8 told | aux:pass |
| 8 | told | tell | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 4 merchant | acl:relcl |
| 9 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 4 merchant | punct |
| 10 | had | have | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 11 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 14 girl | det |
| 12 | slave | slave | NOUN | Number=Sing | 14 girl | compound |
| 13 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 12 slave | punct |
| 14 | girl | girl | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 had | obj |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 10 had | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | tell speech: assert | present · passive | we | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: subject=Recipient | |||||
| 2 | have | past | a certain wealthy merchant | a slave girl | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent girl=Patient |
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/pg74064/13/83/