Celtic Fairy Tales, The Sea-maiden, sentence 78
He asked what cause of woe there was that night.
Who acts: thing, night · What happens: ask, be, cause · To what, where: cause, woe
This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Sea-maiden. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (thing, night), 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 | He | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 asked | nsubj |
| 2 | asked | ask | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | what | what | DET | PronType=Int | 4 cause | det |
| 4 | cause | cause | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 asked | obj |
| 5 | of | of | ADP | _ | 6 woe | case |
| 6 | woe | woe | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 cause | nmod |
| 7 | there | there | PRON | PronType=Dem | 8 was | expl |
| 8 | was | be | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 2 asked | parataxis |
| 9 | that | that | DET | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 10 night | det |
| 10 | night | night | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 was | nsubj |
| 11 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 asked | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ask speech: ask | past | thing | what cause of woe | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent cause=Recipient | ||||
| 2 | be | past | that night | there | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 3 | cause | woe | nom cause «event transitive»: of=patient |
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/pg7885/21/78/