Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 7

So he engaged him, and the first work he set him to do was threshing in the barn.

Who acts: wren, first work · What happens: engage, set, do, thresh · To what, where: farmer, work, barn

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 (wren, first work), 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	So	so	ADV	_	3 engaged	advmod
2	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	3 engaged	nsubj
3	engaged	engage	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	3 engaged	obj
5	,	,	PUNCT	_	16 threshing	punct
6	and	and	CCONJ	_	16 threshing	cc
7	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	9 work	det
8	first	first	ADJ	Degree=Pos NumForm=Word NumType=Ord	9 work	amod
9	work	work	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 threshing	nsubj
10	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	11 set	nsubj
11	set	set	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	9 work	acl:relcl
12	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	11 set	obj
13	to	to	PART	_	14 do	mark
14	do	do	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	11 set	xcomp
15	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	16 threshing	aux
16	threshing	thresh	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	3 engaged	advcl
17	in	in	ADP	_	19 barn	case
18	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	19 barn	det
19	barn	barn	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 threshing	obl
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 engaged	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	roles by
1	engage	past	wren	farmer		vn amalgamate-22.2-3-2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent he=Patient
2	set	past	wren	work		tree rules
3	do	to-infinitive	wren not said here			vn act-114-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
4	thresh	past · progressive	the first work		the barn	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/pg7885/31/7/