Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 254
They were flying about when three grains of barley fell on the floor.
Who acts: pigeon, three grains · What happens: fly, fall · To what, where: floor
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 (pigeon, three grains), 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 | They | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 3 flying | nsubj |
| 2 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 flying | aux |
| 3 | flying | fly | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | root | root |
| 4 | about | about | ADV | _ | 3 flying | advmod |
| 5 | when | when | ADV | PronType=Int | 10 fell | advmod |
| 6 | three | three | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 7 grains | nummod |
| 7 | grains | grain | NOUN | Number=Plur | 10 fell | nsubj |
| 8 | of | of | ADP | _ | 9 barley | case |
| 9 | barley | barley | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 grains | nmod |
| 10 | fell | fall | VERB | Mood=Ind Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 flying | advcl |
| 11 | on | on | ADP | _ | 13 floor | case |
| 12 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 13 floor | det |
| 13 | floor | floor | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 fell | obl |
| 14 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 flying | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fly | past · progressive | pigeon | about property | vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 2 | fall | past | three grains of barley | the floor | vn occur-48.3 «NP V PP»: agent=Theme on floor=Location |
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/pg7885/31/254/