---
title: “Who is Humpy-Dumpy?” asked the Mice. — Andersen's Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “Who is Humpy-Dumpy?” asked the Mice. Who acts: Humpy Dumpy, Mice. A sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Fir Tree, 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/pg1597/10/172/)

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# Andersen's Fairy Tales, The Fir Tree, sentence 172

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“Who is Humpy-Dumpy?” asked the Mice.

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**Who acts:** Humpy Dumpy, Mice · **What happens:** be, ask · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Fir Tree. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Humpy Dumpy, Mice), 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:pg1597:809`): 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:pg1597:10:172
# text = “Who is Humpy-Dumpy?” asked the Mice.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Who	who	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	9	ccomp	_	_
3	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	cop	_	_
4	Humpy	Humpy	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	6	compound	_	_
5	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	6	punct	_	_
6	Dumpy	Dumpy	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
8	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
9	asked	ask	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
10	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	Mice	mouse	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	9	nsubj	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** *in a quote* | present | Humpy Dumpy |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **ask** *speech: ask* | past | the Mice |  |  |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: 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:** «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, Project Gutenberg book 1597 (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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