Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 36
The king's son asked this lad if he had seen a big black raven.
Who acts: son · What happens: ask, see · To what, where: lad, big black raven
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), 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 | The | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 2 king | det |
| 2 | king | king | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 son | nmod:poss |
| 3 | 's | 's | PART | _ | 2 king | case |
| 4 | son | son | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 asked | nsubj |
| 5 | asked | ask | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 6 | this | this | DET | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 7 lad | det |
| 7 | lad | lad | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 asked | obj |
| 8 | if | if | SCONJ | _ | 11 seen | mark |
| 9 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 11 seen | nsubj |
| 10 | had | have | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 11 seen | aux |
| 11 | seen | see | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part | 5 asked | advcl |
| 12 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 15 raven | det |
| 13 | big | big | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 15 raven | amod |
| 14 | black | black | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 15 raven | amod |
| 15 | raven | raven | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 seen | obj |
| 16 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 5 asked | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ask speech: ask | past | the king's son | this lad | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent lad=Recipient | ||||
| 2 | see a condition, not said to happen | past · perfect | son | a big black raven | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer raven=Stimulus |
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/pg7885/31/36/