Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 208

He was not long making a way through the blackthorn.

Who acts: trick · What happens: not be, make · To what, where: way, blackthorn

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 (trick), 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	4 long	nsubj
2	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 long	cop
3	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	4 long	advmod
4	long	long	ADJ	Degree=Pos	root	root
5	making	make	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	4 long	advcl
6	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	7 way	det
7	way	way	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 making	obj
8	through	through	ADP	_	10 blackthorn	case
9	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	10 blackthorn	det
10	blackthorn	blackthorn	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 making	obl
11	.	.	PUNCT	_	4 long	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	not is	past	trick					long property	tree rules
2	make	gerund	trick not said here	a way		the blackthorn			vn build-26.1-1 «NP.asset V NP»: agent=Asset way=Product

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/pg7885/31/208/