---
title: “No place can be better than ours, and I have nothing to wish for!” — Andersen's Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “No place can be better than ours, and I have nothing to wish for!” Who acts: place, Father Snail. A sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Happy Family, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/20/21/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [Andersen's Fairy Tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/) / [The Happy Family](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/20/) / 21

# Andersen's Fairy Tales, The Happy Family, sentence 21

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
“No place can be better than ours, and I have nothing to wish for!”

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** place, Father Snail · **What happens:** be, have, wish · **To what, where:** nothing

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Happy Family. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (place, Father Snail), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg1597:20:21
# text = “No place can be better than ours, and I have nothing to wish for!”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	No	no	DET	DT	PronType=Neg	3	det	_	_
3	place	place	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
4	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
5	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	cop	_	_
6	better	good	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	0	root	_	_
7	than	than	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	ours	our	PRON	PRP	Number=Plur|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
10	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
11	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
12	have	have	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	conj	_	_
13	nothing	nothing	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Neg	12	obj	_	_
14	to	to	PART	TO	_	15	mark	_	_
15	wish	wish	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	13	acl	_	_
16	for	for	ADP	IN	_	15	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
17	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
18	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** *in a quote* | can | no place |  |  |  |  | than ours; good *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **have** *in a quote* | present | Father Snail *= snail* | nothing |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent nothing=Patient |
| 3 | **wish** *in a quote* | to-infinitive | Father Snail *= snail* *not said here* | nothing *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn wish-62 «NP V for NP S\_INF»: agent=Pivot |

<!-- .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.

<!-- div src -->

**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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/20/20/)
- next →: [sentence 22](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/20/22/)
- ↑ back to [The Happy Family](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/20/)