The Happy Prince, and Other Tales, Opening, part 5, sentence 7
But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means?
Who acts: one · What happens: be, not say, mean · Speech: someone speaks here
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 (one), 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 | But | but | CCONJ | _ | 2 what | cc |
| 2 | what | what | PRON | PronType=Rel | 5 good | obl |
| 3 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 5 good | cop |
| 4 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 5 good | det |
| 5 | good | good | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 6 | of | of | ADP | _ | 7 friendship | case |
| 7 | friendship | friendship | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 good | obl |
| 8 | if | if | SCONJ | _ | 12 say | mark |
| 9 | one | one | PRON | Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 12 say | nsubj |
| 10 | can | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 12 say | aux |
| 11 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 12 say | advmod |
| 12 | say | say | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 5 good | csubj |
| 13 | exactly | exactly | ADV | _ | 14 what | advmod |
| 14 | what | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 16 means | obj |
| 15 | one | one | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 16 means | nsubj |
| 16 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 12 say | ccomp |
| 17 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 5 good | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | present | of friendship; good property | tree rules | |||||
| 2 | not say speech: assert a condition, not said to happen | can | one | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V how S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | |||||
| 3 | mean | present | one | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Topic |
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/pg902/5/7/