Gleanings from Chinese folklore, A Story of Old China, part 1, sentence 31

Together they wept and knocked their heads, but only to be joined almost at once by Nien Chi.

Who acts: servants · What happens: weep, knock, join · To what, where: heads

This is a sentence of «Gleanings from Chinese folklore» by Nellie Naomi Russell, A Story of Old China, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (servants), 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	Together	together	ADV	_	3 wept	advmod
2	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	3 wept	nsubj
3	wept	weep	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	and	and	CCONJ	_	5 knocked	cc
5	knocked	knock	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	3 wept	conj
6	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	7 heads	nmod:poss
7	heads	head	NOUN	Number=Plur	5 knocked	obj
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 joined	punct
9	but	but	CCONJ	_	13 joined	cc
10	only	only	ADV	_	13 joined	advmod
11	to	to	PART	_	13 joined	mark
12	be	be	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	13 joined	aux:pass
13	joined	join	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	3 wept	conj
14	almost	almost	ADV	_	16 once	advmod
15	at	at	ADP	_	16 once	case
16	once	once	ADV	NumForm=Word NumType=Mult	13 joined	advmod
17	by	by	ADP	_	18 Nien	case
18	Nien	Nien	PROPN	Number=Sing	16 once	obl
19	Chi	Chi	PROPN	Number=Sing	18 Nien	flat
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 wept	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	weep	past	servants = servant		together property	vn breathe-40.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent
2	knock	past	servants = servant not said here	servants's heads		vn split-23.2 «NP V NP apart»: agent=Agent head=Patient
3	join	to-infinitive · passive	servants = servant not said here		once property	vn mix-22.1-2-1 «NP V»

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/pg75089/17/31/

🌲 Gleanings from Chinese folklore, A Story of Old China, part 1, sentence 31

The tree

Pragmatics

Gleanings from Chinese folklore, A Story of Old China, part 1, sentence 31