Tanglewood Tales, The Pomegranate Seeds., part 1, sentence 17

If it were not for that, we should look like bunches of uprooted seaweed dried in the sun.

Who acts: break, we · What happens: not be, look, uproot, dry · To what, where: uprooted seaweed, sun.

This is a sentence of «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Pomegranate Seeds., part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (break, we), 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	If	if	SCONJ	_	6 that	mark
2	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	6 that	nsubj
3	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	6 that	cop
4	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	6 that	advmod
5	for	for	ADP	_	6 that	case
6	that	that	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Dem	10 look	obl
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	6 that	punct
8	we	we	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs	10 look	nsubj
9	should	should	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	10 look	aux
10	look	look	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
11	like	like	ADP	_	12 bunches	case
12	bunches	bunch	NOUN	Number=Plur	10 look	obl
13	of	of	ADP	_	15 seaweed	case
14	uprooted	uproot	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	15 seaweed	amod
15	seaweed	seaweed	NOUN	Number=Sing	12 bunches	nmod
16	dried	dry	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	15 seaweed	acl
17	in	in	ADP	_	19 sun.	case
18	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	19 sun.	det
19	sun.	sun.	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 dried	obl

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	not is a condition, not said to happen	past	break			for that	tree rules
2	look	should	we			like bunches of uprooted seaweed	vn stimulus_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus
3	uproot	participle					vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent
4	dry	participle		uprooted seaweed not said here	the sun.		vn other_cos-45.4-1 «NP.patient V»: agent=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: «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/pg976/20/17/