---
title: Laughing is an infallible sign of the highest degree of mental devel… — Andersen's Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Laughing is an infallible sign of the highest degree of mental development. Who acts: Laughing. A sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Shoes of Fortune, part 5, 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/pg1597/9/26/)

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# Andersen's Fairy Tales, The Shoes of Fortune, part 5, sentence 26

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Laughing is an infallible sign of the highest degree of mental development.

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**Who acts:** Laughing · **What happens:** laugh, be · **To what, where:** infallible sign

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This is a sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Shoes of Fortune, part 5. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Laughing), 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:pg1597:9:26
# text = Laughing is an infallible sign of the highest degree of mental development.
1	Laughing	laugh	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	csubj	_	_
2	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
3	an	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	infallible	infallible	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	sign	sign	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
6	of	of	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	highest	high	ADJ	JJS	Degree=Sup	9	amod	_	_
9	degree	degree	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nmod	_	_
10	of	of	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
11	mental	mental	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	amod	_	_
12	development	development	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **laugh** | gerund |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn nonverbal\_expression-40.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **is a** | present | Laughing | a infallible sign |  |  |  | of the highest degree of mental development | 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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