The grateful elephant, Opening, part 6, sentence 116
Others spoke thus: “We, your majesty, would cut off his feet.”
Who acts: Others, We · What happens: speak, cut off · To what, where: feet · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 6. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Others, We), 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 | Others | other | NOUN | Number=Plur | 2 spoke | nsubj |
| 2 | spoke | speak | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | thus | thus | ADV | _ | 2 spoke | advmod |
| 4 | : | : | PUNCT | _ | 2 spoke | punct |
| 5 | “ | " | PUNCT | _ | 12 cut | punct |
| 6 | We | we | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs | 12 cut | nsubj |
| 7 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 9 majesty | punct |
| 8 | your | your | PRON | Case=Gen Person=2 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 9 majesty | nmod:poss |
| 9 | majesty | majesty | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 We | appos |
| 10 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 6 We | punct |
| 11 | would | would | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 12 cut | aux |
| 12 | cut | cut | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 2 spoke | parataxis |
| 13 | off | off | ADP | _ | 12 cut | compound:prt |
| 14 | his | his | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 15 feet | nmod:poss |
| 15 | feet | foot | NOUN | Number=Plur | 12 cut | obj |
| 16 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 12 cut | punct |
| 17 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 12 cut | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | speak speech: other | past | Others | thus property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | cut off in a quote | would | We | king's feet | vn stop-55.4-1 «NP V NP.eventuality»: agent=Affector foot=Eventuality |
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/pg74064/6/116/