Gleanings from Chinese folklore, T’ang Sung’s Journey to Get the Buddhist Classics, sentence 122
They exerted all their combined strength but could not remove the darkness.
Who acts: feet · What happens: exert, combine, not remove · To what, where: combined strength, darkness
This is a sentence of «Gleanings from Chinese folklore» by Nellie Naomi Russell, T’ang Sung’s Journey to Get the Buddhist Classics. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (feet), 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 | They | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 exerted | nsubj |
| 2 | exerted | exert | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | all | all | DET | PronType=Tot | 6 strength | det:predet |
| 4 | their | their | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 6 strength | nmod:poss |
| 5 | combined | combine | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 6 strength | amod |
| 6 | strength | strength | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 exerted | obj |
| 7 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 10 remove | cc |
| 8 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 10 remove | aux |
| 9 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 10 remove | advmod |
| 10 | remove | remove | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 2 exerted | conj |
| 11 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 12 darkness | det |
| 12 | darkness | darkness | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 remove | obj |
| 13 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 exerted | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | exert | past | feet = foot | feet's combined strength | vn use-105.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent strength=Theme | ||||
| 2 | combine | participle | vn mix-22.1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Patient | ||||||
| 3 | not remove | could | feet = foot not said here | the darkness | vn fire-10.10 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent darkness=Theme |
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: «Gleanings from Chinese folklore» by Nellie Naomi Russell, Project Gutenberg book 75089 (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/pg75089/16/122/