---
title: But the dark objects were not cattle. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: But the dark objects were not cattle. Who acts: dark objects. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Black Douglas., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Black Douglas., sentence 20

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But the dark objects were not cattle.

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**Who acts:** dark objects · **What happens:** not be · **To what, where:** cattle

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Black Douglas.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (dark objects), 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:pg18442:13:20
# text = But the dark objects were not cattle.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	7	cc	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	dark	dark	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	objects	object	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nsubj	_	_
5	were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
6	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	7	advmod	_	_
7	cattle	cattle	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **is a** | past | the dark objects | cattle |  |  |  |  | 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:** «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 18442 (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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