Folk tales from Tibet, Opening, sentence 18
A story told by a nervous or reluctant narrator loses half its charm.
Who acts: story · What happens: tell, lose · To what, where: story, charm · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «Folk tales from Tibet» by William Frederick Travers, Sir O'Connor, Opening. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (story), 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 | 2 story | det |
| 2 | story | story | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 loses | nsubj |
| 3 | told | tell | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 2 story | acl |
| 4 | by | by | ADP | _ | 9 narrator | case |
| 5 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 9 narrator | det |
| 6 | nervous | nervous | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 9 narrator | amod |
| 7 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 8 reluctant | cc |
| 8 | reluctant | reluctant | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 6 nervous | conj |
| 9 | narrator | narrator | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 told | obl |
| 10 | loses | lose | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 11 | half | half | DET | NumForm=Word NumType=Frac PronType=Ind | 13 charm | det:predet |
| 12 | its | its | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 13 charm | nmod:poss |
| 13 | charm | charm | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 loses | obj |
| 14 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 10 loses | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | tell speech: assert | participle | a story not said here | by a nervous narrator | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent | ||||
| 2 | lose | present | a story | narrator's charm | vn succeed-74-3-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent charm=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: «Folk tales from Tibet» by William Frederick Travers, Sir O'Connor, Project Gutenberg book 75000 (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/pg75000/1/18/