Gleanings from Chinese folklore, A Story of Old China, part 4, sentence 24

Our great sage said, The Superior Man may be poor, but he will never be covetous.

Who acts: great sage, Superior Man, Man · What happens: say, be, not be · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Gleanings from Chinese folklore» by Nellie Naomi Russell, A Story of Old China, part 4. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (great sage, Superior Man, Man), 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	Our	our	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=1 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	3 sage	nmod:poss
2	great	great	ADJ	Degree=Pos	3 sage	amod
3	sage	sage	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 said	nsubj
4	said	say	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
5	,	,	PUNCT	_	11 poor	punct
6	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	8 Man	det
7	Superior	superior	ADJ	Degree=Pos	8 Man	amod
8	Man	man	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 poor	nsubj
9	may	may	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	11 poor	aux
10	be	be	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	11 poor	cop
11	poor	poor	ADJ	Degree=Pos	4 said	ccomp
12	,	,	PUNCT	_	18 covetous	punct
13	but	but	CCONJ	_	18 covetous	cc
14	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	18 covetous	nsubj
15	will	will	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	18 covetous	aux
16	never	never	ADV	PronType=Neg	18 covetous	advmod
17	be	be	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	18 covetous	cop
18	covetous	covetous	ADJ	Degree=Pos	11 poor	conj
19	.	.	PUNCT	_	4 said	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	other	roles by
1	say speech: assert	past	Our great sage		vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent
2	is	may	the Superior Man	poor property	tree rules
3	not is	future	Man	covetous property	tree rules

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/pg75089/20/24/

🌲 Gleanings from Chinese folklore, A Story of Old China, part 4, sentence 24

The tree

Pragmatics

Gleanings from Chinese folklore, A Story of Old China, part 4, sentence 24