---
title: Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!” — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · tree and pragmatics
description: Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!” Who acts: Alice. A sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/4/85/)

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# Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale, sentence 85

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!”

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**Who acts:** Alice · **What happens:** eat, look · **To what, where:** little bird

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This is a sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Alice), 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:pg11:4:85
# text = Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!”
1	Why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	5	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	_
3	she	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	’ll	'll	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
5	eat	eat	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	advcl	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
7	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	bird	bird	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	_
9	as	as	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
10	soon	soon	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	12	advmod	_	_
11	as	as	SCONJ	IN	_	12	mark	_	_
12	look	look	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
13	at	at	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
14	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	12	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
16	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	12	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **eat** | present | Alice | a little bird |  |  |  | 'll *property* | vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent bird=Patient |
| 2 | **look** | imperative |  |  |  |  |  | at pet; soon *property* | vn peer-30.3 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent at it=Theme |

<!-- .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.

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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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