Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 9
Why a flail to be sure), and he knocked off one grain.
Who acts: flail, wren · What happens: be, knock off · To what, where: one grain
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 (flail, wren), 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 | Why | why | ADV | PronType=Int | 6 sure | advmod |
| 2 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 3 flail | det |
| 3 | flail | flail | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 sure | nsubj |
| 4 | to | to | PART | _ | 6 sure | mark |
| 5 | be | be | AUX | VerbForm=Inf | 6 sure | cop |
| 6 | sure | sure | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 7 | ) | ) | PUNCT | _ | 6 sure | punct |
| 8 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 11 knocked | punct |
| 9 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 11 knocked | cc |
| 10 | he | he | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 11 knocked | nsubj |
| 11 | knocked | knock | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 6 sure | conj |
| 12 | off | off | ADP | _ | 11 knocked | compound:prt |
| 13 | one | one | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 14 grain | nummod |
| 14 | grain | grain | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 knocked | obj |
| 15 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 6 sure | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | to-infinitive | a flail | sure property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | knock off | past | wren | one grain | vn steal-10.5 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent grain=Theme |
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/pg7885/31/9/