Celtic Fairy Tales, The Story of Deirdre, sentence 1

There was a man in Ireland once who was called Malcolm Harper.

Who acts: man · What happens: be, call · To what, where: man · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Story of Deirdre. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (man), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

Parsed by Mova, not checked by a teacher. This tree is Mova's own parse (the en model, on the CPU, when the site is built); it may be wrong.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	There	there	PRON	PronType=Dem	2 was	expl
2	was	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	4 man	det
4	man	man	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 was	nsubj
5	in	in	ADP	_	6 Ireland	case
6	Ireland	Ireland	PROPN	Number=Sing	4 man	nmod
7	once	once	ADV	NumForm=Word NumType=Mult	10 called	advmod
8	who	who	PRON	PronType=Rel	10 called	nsubj:pass
9	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	10 called	aux:pass
10	called	call	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	4 man	acl
11	Malcolm	Malcolm	PROPN	Number=Sing	12 Harper	compound
12	Harper	Harper	PROPN	Number=Sing	10 called	xcomp
13	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 was	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	be	past	a man in Ireland			there			vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	call	past · passive		a man in Ireland				once property	vn initiate_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: subject=Recipient

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: «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7885 (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/pg7885/13/1/