Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 105

He begins cleaning the byre, but he might just as well to keep baling the great ocean.

Who acts: tis · What happens: begin, clean, keep, bale · To what, where: byre, great ocean

This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Battle of the Birds. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (tis), 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 begins	nsubj
2	begins	begin	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	cleaning	clean	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	2 begins	xcomp
4	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 byre	det
5	byre	byre	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 cleaning	obj
6	,	,	PUNCT	_	14 keep	punct
7	but	but	CCONJ	_	14 keep	cc
8	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	14 keep	nsubj
9	might	might	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	14 keep	aux
10	just	just	ADV	_	14 keep	advmod
11	as	as	ADV	ExtPos=CCONJ	14 keep	cc
12	well	well	ADV	Degree=Pos	11 as	fixed
13	to	to	PART	_	14 keep	mark
14	keep	keep	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	2 begins	parataxis
15	baling	bale	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	14 keep	xcomp
16	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	18 ocean	det
17	great	great	ADJ	Degree=Pos	18 ocean	amod
18	ocean	ocean	NOUN	Number=Sing	15 baling	obj
19	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 begins	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	roles by
1	begin	present	tis		vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality
2	clean	gerund	tis not said here	the byre	vn other_cos-45.4 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Agent byre=Patient
3	keep	might	tis		tree rules
4	bale	gerund	tis not said here	the great ocean	tree rules

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/pg7885/31/105/