---
title: They found a big tree lying on the ground. — Grimm's Fairy Stories · tree and pragmatics
description: They found a big tree lying on the ground. Who acts: sticks, big tree. A sentence of «Grimm's Fairy Stories» by Jacob Grimm, Snow-white and Rose-red, 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/pg11027/23/44/)

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# Grimm's Fairy Stories, Snow-white and Rose-red, sentence 44

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They found a big tree lying on the ground.

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**Who acts:** sticks, big tree · **What happens:** find, lie · **To what, where:** big tree, ground

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This is a sentence of «Grimm's Fairy Stories» by Jacob Grimm, Snow-white and Rose-red. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (sticks, big tree), 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:pg11027:23:44
# text = They found a big tree lying on the ground.
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	found	find	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	big	big	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	tree	tree	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
6	lying	lie	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	acl	_	_
7	on	on	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	ground	ground	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **find** | past | sticks *= stick* | a big tree |  |  |  |  | vn discover-84 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent tree=Topic |
| 2 | **lie** | gerund | a big tree *not said here* |  |  | the ground |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent on ground=Location |

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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:** «Grimm's Fairy Stories» by Jacob Grimm, Project Gutenberg book 11027 (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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