Celtic Fairy Tales, The Story of Deirdre, sentence 200

Deirdre kept sitting on the brink of the grave, constantly asking the gravediggers to dig the pit wide and free.

Who acts: Deirdre, gravediggers · What happens: keep, sit, ask, dig · To what, where: brink, gravediggers, pit

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 (Deirdre, gravediggers), 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	Deirdre	Deirdre	PROPN	Number=Sing	2 kept	nsubj
2	kept	keep	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	sitting	sit	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	2 kept	xcomp
4	on	on	ADP	_	6 brink	case
5	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	6 brink	det
6	brink	brink	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 sitting	obl
7	of	of	ADP	_	9 grave	case
8	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	9 grave	det
9	grave	grave	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 brink	nmod
10	,	,	PUNCT	_	12 asking	punct
11	constantly	constantly	ADV	_	12 asking	advmod
12	asking	ask	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	3 sitting	conj
13	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	14 gravediggers	det
14	gravediggers	gravedigger	NOUN	Number=Plur	12 asking	obj
15	to	to	PART	_	16 dig	mark
16	dig	dig	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	12 asking	xcomp
17	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	18 pit	det
18	pit	pit	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 dig	obj
19	wide	wide	ADJ	Degree=Pos	16 dig	xcomp
20	and	and	CCONJ	_	21 free	cc
21	free	free	ADJ	Degree=Pos	19 wide	conj
22	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 kept	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	keep	past	Deirdre				tree rules
2	sit	gerund	Deirdre not said here		the brink of the grave		vn assuming_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent on brink=Location
3	ask speech: ask	gerund	Deirdre not said here	the gravediggers		constantly property	vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP whether S_INF»: agent=Agent gravedigger=Recipient clause=Topic
4	dig not said to happen	to-infinitive	the gravediggers not said here	the pit		wide property	vn poke-19-1-1-1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent pit=Theme

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/pg7885/13/200/