Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 121

He took to the moors, but if he did, the birds were not so easy to take.

Who acts: son, birds · What happens: take, do, not be

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 (son, birds), 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 took	nsubj
2	took	take	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	to	to	ADP	_	5 moors	case
4	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 moors	det
5	moors	moor	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 took	obl
6	,	,	PUNCT	_	10 did	punct
7	but	but	CCONJ	_	10 did	cc
8	if	if	SCONJ	_	10 did	mark
9	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	10 did	nsubj
10	did	do	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 took	conj
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	17 easy	punct
12	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	13 birds	det
13	birds	bird	NOUN	Number=Plur	17 easy	nsubj
14	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	17 easy	cop
15	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	17 easy	advmod
16	so	so	ADV	_	17 easy	advmod
17	easy	easy	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 took	parataxis
18	to	to	PART	_	19 take	mark
19	take	take	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	17 easy	csubj
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 took	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	other	roles by
1	take	past	son	to the moors result	vn convert-26.6.2 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Patient to moor=Result
2	do a condition, not said to happen	past	son		vn act-114-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	not is	past	the birds	easy property	tree rules
4	take	to-infinitive			vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent

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/pg7885/31/121/