---
title: Do the dancing maidens sleep, or are they dead? — Andersen's Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Do the dancing maidens sleep, or are they dead? Who acts: you, dancing maidens, worms. A sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Snow Queen, part 2, 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/pg1597/12/107/)

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# Andersen's Fairy Tales, The Snow Queen, part 2, sentence 107

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Do the dancing maidens sleep, or are they dead?

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**Who acts:** you, dancing maidens, worms · **What happens:** do, sleep, be

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This is a sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Snow Queen, part 2. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, dancing maidens, worms), 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:pg1597:12:107
# text = Do the dancing maidens sleep, or are they dead?
1	Do	do	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	dancing	dancing	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	compound	_	_
4	maidens	maiden	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	nsubj	_	_
5	sleep	sleep	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	1	parataxis	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
7	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
8	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	10	cop	_	_
9	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
10	dead	dead	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **do** | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **sleep** | present | the dancing maidens |  |  |  |  |  | vn snooze-40.4-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **is** | present | worms *= worm* |  |  |  |  | dead *property* | tree rules |

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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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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