Celtic Fairy Tales, The Story of Deirdre, sentence 81
What did they see coming but three men a-journeying.
Who acts: Deirdre, three men · What happens: see, come, journey
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, three men), 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 | What | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 4 see | obj |
| 2 | did | do | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 4 see | aux |
| 3 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 4 see | nsubj |
| 4 | see | see | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 5 | coming | come | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 4 see | xcomp |
| 6 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 8 men | cc |
| 7 | three | three | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 8 men | nummod |
| 8 | men | man | NOUN | Number=Plur | 5 coming | conj |
| 9 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 11 journeying | det |
| 10 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 9 a | punct |
| 11 | journeying | journey | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 8 men | acl |
| 12 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 see | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | see | past · do-support | Deirdre | tree rules | |||||
| 2 | come | gerund | Deirdre not said here | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | |||||
| 3 | journey | gerund | three men not said here | vn run-51.3.2-1 «NP V»: agent=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/pg7885/13/81/