The grateful elephant, Opening, part 8, sentence 86
(But why were these thieves called _Despatcher-thieves_?
What happens: be, call · To what, where: thieves · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 8. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: 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 | _ | 7 called | punct |
| 2 | But | but | CCONJ | _ | 7 called | cc |
| 3 | why | why | ADV | PronType=Int | 7 called | advmod |
| 4 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 6 thieves | cop |
| 5 | these | this | DET | Number=Plur PronType=Dem | 6 thieves | det |
| 6 | thieves | thief | NOUN | Number=Plur | 7 called | nsubj:pass |
| 7 | called | call | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | root | root |
| 8 | _ | _ | PUNCT | _ | 11 thieves | punct |
| 9 | Despatcher | Despatcher | PROPN | Number=Sing | 11 thieves | compound |
| 10 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 9 Despatcher | punct |
| 11 | thieves | thief | NOUN | Number=Plur | 7 called | xcomp |
| 12 | _ | _ | PUNCT | _ | 7 called | punct |
| 13 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 7 called | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | past | this thieves | tree rules | |||||
| 2 | call | participle · passive | this thieves | Despatcher thieves xcomp | vn initiate_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: subject=Recipient |
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/pg74064/8/86/