In Ghostly Japan, Names of Incense Used., part 7, sentence 48
All life, to sustain itself, must devour life.
Who acts: life · What happens: sustain, devour · To what, where: life
This is a sentence of «In Ghostly Japan» by Lafcadio Hearn, Names of Incense Used., part 7. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (life), 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 | All | all | DET | PronType=Tot | 2 life | det |
| 2 | life | life | NOUN | Number=Sing | 9 devour | nsubj |
| 3 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 5 sustain | punct |
| 4 | to | to | PART | _ | 5 sustain | mark |
| 5 | sustain | sustain | VERB | Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin | 2 life | parataxis |
| 6 | itself | itself | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs Reflex=Yes | 5 sustain | obj |
| 7 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 2 life | punct |
| 8 | must | must | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 9 devour | aux |
| 9 | devour | devour | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 10 | life | life | NOUN | Number=Sing | 9 devour | obj |
| 11 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 9 devour | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | sustain | to-infinitive | life | vn sustain-55.6 «NP V NP PP.instrument»: agent=Agent itself=Theme | |||||
| 2 | devour | must | all life | life | vn devour-39.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent life=Patient |
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/pg8128/9/48/