In Ghostly Japan, Morning Awakening After a Night’s Rest in a Temple, part 3, sentence 101
But—strange to say!—this seemingly easy thing could not be done.
What happens: say, not do · To what, where: easy thing · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of «In Ghostly Japan» by Lafcadio Hearn, Morning Awakening After a Night’s Rest in a Temple, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.
Mova's own parse. This tree may be wrong.
The tree
The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)
| # | word | lemma | UPOS | features | head | relation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | But | but | CCONJ | _ | 5 say | cc |
| 2 | — | - | PUNCT | _ | 5 say | punct |
| 3 | strange | strange | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 5 say | advcl |
| 4 | to | to | PART | _ | 5 say | mark |
| 5 | say | say | VERB | Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 6 | ! | ! | PUNCT | _ | 5 say | punct |
| 7 | — | - | PUNCT | _ | 15 done | punct |
| 8 | this | this | DET | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 11 thing | det |
| 9 | seemingly | seemingly | ADV | _ | 10 easy | advmod |
| 10 | easy | easy | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 11 thing | amod |
| 11 | thing | thing | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 done | nsubj:pass |
| 12 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 15 done | aux |
| 13 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 15 done | advmod |
| 14 | be | be | AUX | VerbForm=Inf | 15 done | aux:pass |
| 15 | done | do | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 5 say | ccomp |
| 16 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 5 say | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | say speech: assert | to-infinitive | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | ||||||
| 2 | not do | could · passive | this easy thing | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: subject=Eventuality |
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: «In Ghostly Japan» by Lafcadio Hearn, Project Gutenberg book 8128 (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/pg8128/26/101/