Tanglewood Tales, The Dragon's Teeth., part 4, sentence 61

They were almost giants indeed, and had good need to be so, else they never could have lived through so terrible a fight.

Who acts: teeth · What happens: be, have, not live · To what, where: giants, good need

This is a sentence of «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Dragon's Teeth., part 4. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (teeth), 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	They	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	4 giants	nsubj
2	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 giants	cop
3	almost	almost	ADV	_	4 giants	advmod
4	giants	giant	NOUN	Number=Plur	root	root
5	indeed	indeed	ADV	_	4 giants	advmod
6	,	,	PUNCT	_	8 had	punct
7	and	and	CCONJ	_	8 had	cc
8	had	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 giants	parataxis
9	good	good	ADJ	Degree=Pos	10 need	amod
10	need	need	NOUN	Number=Sing	8 had	obj
11	to	to	PART	_	13 so	mark
12	be	be	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	13 so	cop
13	so	so	ADV	_	10 need	acl
14	,	,	PUNCT	_	20 lived	punct
15	else	else	ADV	_	20 lived	advmod
16	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	20 lived	nsubj
17	never	never	ADV	PronType=Neg	20 lived	advmod
18	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	20 lived	aux
19	have	have	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	20 lived	aux
20	lived	live	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	8 had	conj
21	through	through	ADP	_	23 terrible	case
22	so	so	ADV	_	23 terrible	advmod
23	terrible	terrible	ADJ	Degree=Pos	20 lived	conj
24	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	25 fight	det
25	fight	fight	NOUN	Number=Sing	23 terrible	nsubj
26	.	.	PUNCT	_	4 giants	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	is a	past	teeth = tooth	giants	almost, indeed property	tree rules
2	have	past		good need		vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent need=Patient
3	is	to-infinitive		good need not said here	so property	tree rules
4	not live	could · perfect	teeth = tooth		else property	vn exist-47.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme

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: «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Project Gutenberg book 976 (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/pg976/13/61/