---
title: The strange rabbit stopped dancing, and came quite close. — The Velveteen Rabbit · tree and pragmatics
description: The strange rabbit stopped dancing, and came quite close. Who acts: strange rabbit. A sentence of «The Velveteen Rabbit» by Margery Williams Bianco, Opening, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Velveteen Rabbit, Opening, sentence 126

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The strange rabbit stopped dancing, and came quite close.

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**Who acts:** strange rabbit · **What happens:** stop, dance, come

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This is a sentence of «The Velveteen Rabbit» by Margery Williams Bianco, Opening. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (strange rabbit), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg11757:100`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg11757:1:126
# text = The strange rabbit stopped dancing, and came quite close.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	strange	strange	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	rabbit	rabbit	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	stopped	stop	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	dancing	dance	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	4	xcomp	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	came	come	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	conj	_	_
9	quite	quite	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
10	close	close	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	xcomp	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **stop** | past | the strange rabbit |  |  |  |  |  | vn stop-55.4-1-1 «NP V S\_ING»: agent=Affector clause=Eventuality |
| 2 | **dance** | gerund | the strange rabbit *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn modes\_of\_being\_with\_motion-47.3 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 3 | **come** | past | the strange rabbit *not said here* |  |  |  |  | close *property* | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V»: agent=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:** «The Velveteen Rabbit» by Margery Williams Bianco, Project Gutenberg book 11757 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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