---
title: The first witness was the Hatter. — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · tree and pragmatics
description: The first witness was the Hatter. Who acts: first witness. A sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter XI. Who Stole the Tarts?, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter XI. Who Stole the Tarts?, sentence 29

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The first witness was the Hatter.

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**Who acts:** first witness · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** Hatter

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This is a sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter XI. Who Stole the Tarts?. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (first witness), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**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 {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg11:12:29
# text = The first witness was the Hatter.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	first	first	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos|NumForm=Word|NumType=Ord	3	amod	_	_
3	witness	witness	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
4	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	Hatter	Hatter	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | past | the first witness | the Hatter |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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.

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**Text:** «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Project Gutenberg book 11 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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