Verbless prose¶
verbless_prose · syntax · validated
A text written without any finite verb, so that everything must be carried by nouns, participles and apposition.
Provenance¶
- Source: Oulipo, Atlas de littérature potentielle (1981)
- Attribution:
reference— attested in a standard reference rather than traced to an origin - Checkability:
self— decidable from the text and its parameters alone - Attested:
codified— formulated as a rule by a tradition rather than declared by an author
Details¶
- Kind: restrictive
- Languages: en
- Requires:
tokens,pos - Deterministic: yes
Notes¶
The checker flags every token the pos tagger reads as a finite verb, tagging sentence by sentence; participles, infinitives and gerunds are left alone, which is the distinction the row turns on. It does not check that the sense is carried by "nouns, participles and apposition" — that clause of the definition describes what is left to a writer who obeys the bar, and nothing here verifies it. The verdict is a tagger's and not a fact: ADR 0045 measures finite-verb precision 0.9482 and recall 0.9498, so roughly one finite verb in twenty passes and roughly one flagged token in twenty was never one. Reports carry undecided_words, and a violation on a form the tagger never saw carries a note saying so.
Prompt hint¶
Describe the scene without using a single finite verb.
Examples¶
bleak-house-opening¶
en — this text satisfies the procedure.
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.
Source: Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), chapter 1, first three sentences
ordinary-prose¶
en — this text does not satisfy the procedure.
She walked home through the rain and did not look back.
Source: constructed counterexample
sentence-initial-noun-read-as-a-verb¶
en — this text does not satisfy the procedure.
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes.
Source: Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), chapter 1. Genuinely verbless — a known false positive: the tagger reads the sentence-initial Smoke as a finite verb. The smoke lowering down ... is satisfied.
unseen-participle-read-as-a-verb¶
en — this text does not satisfy the procedure.
Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.
Source: Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), chapter 1. Genuinely verbless — a known false positive on splashed, a form absent from the tagger's training data, and the violation carries the note that says so.
hyphenated-compound-split-into-a-verb¶
en — this text does not satisfy the procedure.
Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners.
Source: Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), chapter 1. Genuinely verbless — a known false positive caused by tokenisation, not by the tagger: foot-hold is split and its second half is tagged alone. See ADR 0045.
empty-text¶
en — this text satisfies the procedure.
Source: constructed example; vacuously satisfied, as _report defines it