---
title: “I can hardly breathe.” — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · tree and pragmatics
description: “I can hardly breathe.” Who acts: Dormouse. 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.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/12/50/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/) / [Chapter XI. Who Stole the Tarts?](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/12/) / 50

# Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter XI. Who Stole the Tarts?, sentence 50

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
“I can hardly breathe.”

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** Dormouse · **What happens:** breathe

<!-- .vabout -->
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 (Dormouse), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg11:12:50
# text = “I can hardly breathe.”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
3	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	hardly	hardly	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
5	breathe	breathe	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **breathe** *in a quote* | can | the Dormouse *= dormouse* |  |  |  |  | hardly *property* | vn breathe-40.1.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 49](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/12/49/)
- next →: [sentence 51](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/12/51/)
- ↑ back to [Chapter XI. Who Stole the Tarts?](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/12/)