Gleanings from Chinese folklore, A Story of Old China, part 3, sentence 95
I was afraid to tell you all the truth.
Who acts: I · What happens: be, tell · To what, where: truth, you · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «Gleanings from Chinese folklore» by Nellie Naomi Russell, A Story of Old China, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (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 | I | I | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs | 3 afraid | nsubj |
| 2 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 afraid | cop |
| 3 | afraid | afraid | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 4 | to | to | PART | _ | 5 tell | mark |
| 5 | tell | tell | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 afraid | xcomp |
| 6 | you | you | PRON | Case=Acc Person=2 PronType=Prs | 5 tell | iobj |
| 7 | all | all | DET | PronType=Tot | 9 truth | det:predet |
| 8 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 9 truth | det |
| 9 | truth | truth | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 tell | obj |
| 10 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 afraid | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | past | I | afraid property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | tell speech: assert | to-infinitive | I not said here | all truth | you | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent you=Recipient truth=Topic |
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/pg75089/19/95/