The grateful elephant, Opening, part 3, sentence 87
We didn’t tell you because we were afraid it would break your heart.
Who acts: We, friend · What happens: not tell, be, break · To what, where: you, heart · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (We, friend), 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 | We | we | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs | 4 tell | nsubj |
| 2 | did | do | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 4 tell | aux |
| 3 | n’t | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 4 tell | advmod |
| 4 | tell | tell | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 5 | you | you | PRON | Case=Acc Person=2 PronType=Prs | 4 tell | iobj |
| 6 | because | because | SCONJ | _ | 9 afraid | mark |
| 7 | we | we | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs | 9 afraid | nsubj |
| 8 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 9 afraid | cop |
| 9 | afraid | afraid | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 4 tell | advcl |
| 10 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 12 break | nsubj |
| 11 | would | would | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 12 break | aux |
| 12 | break | break | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 9 afraid | ccomp |
| 13 | your | your | PRON | Case=Gen Person=2 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 14 heart | nmod:poss |
| 14 | heart | heart | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 break | obj |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 tell | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | not tell speech: assert | past · do-support | We | you | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent you=Recipient | ||||
| 2 | is | past | we | afraid property | tree rules | ||||
| 3 | break | would | friend | your heart | vn hurt-40.8.3-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer heart=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/pg74064/3/87/