---
title: But the Princess touched it, and was almost ready to cry. — Andersen's Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: But the Princess touched it, and was almost ready to cry. Who acts: Princess. A sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Swineherd, 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/pg1597/3/15/)

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# Andersen's Fairy Tales, The Swineherd, sentence 15

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But the Princess touched it, and was almost ready to cry.

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**Who acts:** Princess · **What happens:** touch, be, cry · **To what, where:** joy

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This is a sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Swineherd. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Princess), 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:pg1597:3:15
# text = But the Princess touched it, and was almost ready to cry.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	Princess	Princess	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	touched	touch	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
8	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	10	cop	_	_
9	almost	almost	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
10	ready	ready	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	conj	_	_
11	to	to	PART	TO	_	12	mark	_	_
12	cry	cry	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **touch** | past | the Princess | joy |  |  |  |  | vn contiguous\_location-47.8-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Theme it=Co-Theme |
| 2 | **is** | past | the Princess *not said here* |  |  |  |  | almost, ready *property* | tree rules |
| 3 | **cry** *speech: express* | to-infinitive | the Princess *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn manner\_speaking-37.3 «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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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