Celtic Fairy Tales, The Wooing of Olwen, sentence 154

Hard had been their trouble before, but it was child's play to what they met in seeking the comb.

Who acts: track, scissors · What happens: be, meet, seek · To what, where: trouble, play, comb

This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Wooing of Olwen. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (track, scissors), 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	Hard	hard	ADV	Degree=Pos	5 trouble	advmod
2	had	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	5 trouble	aux
3	been	be	AUX	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	5 trouble	cop
4	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	5 trouble	nmod:poss
5	trouble	trouble	NOUN	Number=Sing	root	root
6	before	before	ADV	_	5 trouble	advmod
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 play	punct
8	but	but	CCONJ	_	13 play	cc
9	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	13 play	nsubj
10	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	13 play	cop
11	child	child	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 play	nmod:poss
12	's	's	PART	_	11 child	case
13	play	play	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 trouble	conj
14	to	to	ADP	_	15 what	case
15	what	what	PRON	PronType=Rel	13 play	nmod
16	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	17 met	nsubj
17	met	meet	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	15 what	acl:relcl
18	in	in	SCONJ	_	19 seeking	mark
19	seeking	seek	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	17 met	advcl
20	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	21 comb	det
21	comb	comb	NOUN	Number=Sing	19 seeking	obj
22	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 trouble	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	is a	past · perfect		scissors's trouble but child's play	before, hard property	tree rules
2	is a	past	track	child's play	to scissors's trouble but child's play	tree rules
3	meet	past	scissors			vn meet-36.3-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
4	seek	gerund	scissors not said here	the comb		vn hunt-35.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent comb=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/pg7885/17/154/