The Happy Prince, and Other Tales, Opening, part 5, sentence 120

Why! if they were real crackers they could not be lovelier.

Who acts: fireworks · What happens: not be

This is a sentence of «The Happy Prince, and Other Tales» by Oscar Wilde, Opening, part 5. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (fireworks), 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	root	root
2	!	!	PUNCT	_	1 Why	punct
3	if	if	SCONJ	_	12 lovelier	mark
4	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	12 lovelier	nsubj
5	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	12 lovelier	cop
6	real	real	ADJ	Degree=Pos	7 crackers	amod
7	crackers	cracker	NOUN	Number=Plur	12 lovelier	nsubj
8	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	12 lovelier	nsubj
9	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	12 lovelier	aux
10	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	12 lovelier	advmod
11	be	be	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	12 lovelier	cop
12	lovelier	lovely	ADJ	Degree=Cmp	1 Why	advcl:relcl
13	.	.	PUNCT	_	1 Why	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	not is	could · past	fireworks = firework					lovely property	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: «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/pg902/5/120/