---
title: If they had any sense, they’d take the roof off.” — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · tree and pragmatics
description: If they had any sense, they’d take the roof off.” Who acts: shriek. A sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill, 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/pg11/5/98/)

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# Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill, sentence 98

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If they had any sense, they’d take the roof off.”

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**Who acts:** shriek · **What happens:** have, take off · **To what, where:** sense, roof

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This is a sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (shriek), 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:pg11:5:98
# text = If they had any sense, they’d take the roof off.”
1	If	if	SCONJ	IN	_	3	mark	_	_
2	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	any	any	DET	DT	PronType=Ind	5	det	_	_
5	sense	sense	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
7	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	9	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	’d	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	9	aux	_	_
9	take	take	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	parataxis	_	_
10	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	roof	roof	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obj	_	_
12	off	off	ADP	RP	_	9	compound:prt	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **have** | past | shriek | any sense |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent sense=Patient |
| 2 | **take off** | would | shriek | the roof |  |  |  |  | vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent roof=Theme |

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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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