---
title: "Was he as big as this?" said she. — Aesop's Fables; a new translation, by Aesop · tree and pragmatics
description: "Was he as big as this?" said she. Who acts: Notoriety, Dog. A sentence of «Aesop's Fables; a new translation, by Aesop», a book of tales from Project Gutenberg with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Aesop's Fables; a new translation, by Aesop, sentence 456

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"Was he as big as this?" said she.

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**Who acts:** Notoriety, Dog · **What happens:** be, say · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Aesop's Fables; a new translation, by Aesop», a book of tales from Project Gutenberg. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Notoriety, Dog), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = gutenberg:pg11339:456
# text = "Was he as big as this?" said she.
# source = Project Gutenberg (public domain in the USA), book id in sent_id
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	_
2	Was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
3	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
4	as	as	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
5	big	big	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	ccomp	_	_
6	as	as	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
7	this	this	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	5	obl	_	_
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
9	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
10	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
11	she	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** *in a quote* | past | Notoriety |  |  |  |  | as this; big *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **say** *speech: ask* | past | Dog |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent |

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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:** «Aesop's Fables; a new translation, by Aesop», Project Gutenberg book 11339 (public domain in the USA). **Annotation:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`mova-tales-silver-en.conllu`), Apache-2.0 OR MIT: parsed by Mova, patched by a large language model as teacher under UD validation gates. Sentence `gutenberg:pg11339:456`.

**The tree:** Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18. **The frames** are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (`prag`) when this page is built, the tale's sample read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the [release 0.3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.3/).

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