---
title: It hit against the wall, and broke into a thousand pieces. — The Arabian Nights Entertainments · tree and pragmatics
description: It hit against the wall, and broke into a thousand pieces. Who acts: missile. A sentence of «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 30, 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/pg128/30/44/)

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# The Arabian Nights Entertainments, Opening, part 30, sentence 44

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It hit against the wall, and broke into a thousand pieces.

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**Who acts:** missile · **What happens:** hit, break · **To what, where:** wall, thousand pieces

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This is a sentence of «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 30. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (missile), 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:pg128:30:44
# text = It hit against the wall, and broke into a thousand pieces.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	hit	hit	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	against	against	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	wall	wall	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	broke	break	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
9	into	into	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	thousand	thousand	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	12	nummod	_	_
12	pieces	piece	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **hit** | past | missile |  |  | the wall |  |  | vn bump-18.4 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme against wall=Location |
| 2 | **break** | past | missile *not said here* |  |  |  |  | into thousand pieces *result* | vn break-45.1 «NP V PP.result»: agent=Patient into piece=Result |

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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 Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 128 (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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