The Happy Prince, and Other Tales, Opening, part 3, sentence 93
The birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing.
Who acts: birds, flowers · What happens: fly, twitter, look up, laugh
This is a sentence of «The Happy Prince, and Other Tales» by Oscar Wilde, Opening, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (birds, flowers), 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 birds | det |
| 2 | birds | bird | NOUN | Number=Plur | 4 flying | nsubj |
| 3 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 4 flying | aux |
| 4 | flying | fly | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | root | root |
| 5 | about | about | ADV | _ | 4 flying | advmod |
| 6 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 7 twittering | cc |
| 7 | twittering | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 4 flying | conj | |
| 8 | with | with | ADP | _ | 9 delight | case |
| 9 | delight | delight | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 twittering | obl |
| 10 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 15 looking | punct |
| 11 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 15 looking | cc |
| 12 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 13 flowers | det |
| 13 | flowers | flower | NOUN | Number=Plur | 15 looking | nsubj |
| 14 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 15 looking | aux |
| 15 | looking | look | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 4 flying | conj |
| 16 | up | up | ADP | _ | 15 looking | compound:prt |
| 17 | through | through | ADP | _ | 20 grass | case |
| 18 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 20 grass | det |
| 19 | green | green | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 20 grass | amod |
| 20 | grass | grass | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 looking | obl |
| 21 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 22 laughing | cc |
| 22 | laughing | laugh | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 15 looking | conj |
| 23 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 flying | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fly | past · progressive | the birds | about property | vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 2 | gerund | the birds not said here | with delight | vn animal_sounds-38 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 3 | look up | past · progressive | the flowers | through the green grass | vn peer-30.3 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent through grass=Theme | ||||
| 4 | laugh | gerund | the flowers not said here | vn nonverbal_expression-40.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
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: «The Happy Prince, and Other Tales» by Oscar Wilde, Project Gutenberg book 902 (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/pg902/3/93/