Gleanings from Chinese folklore, A Story of Old China, part 2, sentence 44
Tell me, or I truly will beat my brains out against the bricks.”
Who acts: you, I · What happens: tell, beat out · To what, where: me, brains · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «Gleanings from Chinese folklore» by Nellie Naomi Russell, A Story of Old China, part 2. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, I), 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 | Tell | tell | VERB | Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 2 | me | I | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs | 1 Tell | iobj |
| 3 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 8 beat | punct |
| 4 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 8 beat | cc |
| 5 | I | I | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs | 8 beat | nsubj |
| 6 | truly | truly | ADV | _ | 8 beat | advmod |
| 7 | will | will | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 8 beat | aux |
| 8 | beat | beat | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 1 Tell | parataxis |
| 9 | my | my | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Sing Person=1 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 10 brains | nmod:poss |
| 10 | brains | brain | NOUN | Number=Plur | 8 beat | obj |
| 11 | out | out | ADV | _ | 8 beat | advmod |
| 12 | against | against | ADP | _ | 14 bricks | case |
| 13 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 14 bricks | det |
| 14 | bricks | brick | NOUN | Number=Plur | 8 beat | obl |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 1 Tell | punct |
| 16 | ” | " | PUNCT | _ | 1 Tell | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | tell speech: assert | imperative | you not said here | me | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient | ||||
| 2 | beat out | future | I | my brains | against the bricks; out, truly property | vn hit-18.1-1 «NP V NP PP»: agent=Agent brain=Instrument against brick=Patient |
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/pg75089/18/44/