---
title: Then he tried the middling saucer, and he drank a little of that. — More English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Then he tried the middling saucer, and he drank a little of that. Who acts: Scrapefoot. A sentence of «More English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales, part 9, 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/pg14241/23/31/)

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# More English Fairy Tales, More English Fairy Tales, part 9, sentence 31

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Then he tried the middling saucer, and he drank a little of that.

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**Who acts:** Scrapefoot · **What happens:** try, drink · **To what, where:** middling saucer, little

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This is a sentence of «More English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales, part 9. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Scrapefoot), 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:pg14241:23:31
# text = Then he tried the middling saucer, and he drank a little of that.
1	Then	then	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	3	advmod	_	_
2	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	tried	try	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	middling	middling	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	compound	_	_
6	saucer	saucer	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
9	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
10	drank	drink	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	_
11	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	obj	_	_
13	of	of	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
14	that	that	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	12	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **try** | past | Scrapefoot | the middling saucer |  |  | then |  | vn try-61.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent saucer=Eventuality |
| 2 | **drink** | past | Scrapefoot | a little |  |  |  |  | vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent little=Patient |

<!-- .note -->
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:** «More English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 14241 (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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