English Fairy Tales, The Red Ettin, sentence 30

And then the third head asked: “The dead carrying the living; riddle me that?”

Who acts: third head · What happens: ask, carry, riddle · To what, where: living, third head · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Red Ettin. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (third head), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

Parsed by Mova, not checked by a teacher. This tree is Mova's own parse (the en model, on the CPU, when the site is built); it may be wrong.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	And	and	CCONJ	_	6 asked	cc
2	then	then	ADV	PronType=Dem	6 asked	advmod
3	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 head	det
4	third	third	ADJ	Degree=Pos NumForm=Word NumType=Ord	5 head	amod
5	head	head	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 asked	nsubj
6	asked	ask	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
7	:	:	PUNCT	_	10 dead	punct
8	“	"	PUNCT	_	10 dead	punct
9	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	10 dead	det
10	dead	dead	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 asked	ccomp
11	carrying	carry	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	10 dead	advcl
12	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	13 living	det
13	living	living	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 carrying	obj
14	;	;	PUNCT	_	15 riddle	punct
15	riddle	riddle	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	6 asked	ccomp
16	me	I	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs	15 riddle	obj
17	that	that	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Dem	15 riddle	obj
18	?	?	PUNCT	_	15 riddle	punct
19	”	"	PUNCT	_	15 riddle	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	when	roles by
1	ask speech: ask	past	the third head		then	vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V how S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
2	carry in a quote	gerund	the third head not said here	the living		vn carry-11.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent living=Theme
3	riddle in a quote	infinitive		the third head = head		tree rules

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: «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7439 (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/pg7439/26/30/