---
title: The boy stood firm and still. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: The boy stood firm and still. Who acts: boy. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Story of William Tell., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Story of William Tell., sentence 24

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The boy stood firm and still.

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**Who acts:** boy · **What happens:** stand

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Story of William Tell.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (boy), 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:pg18442:23:24
# text = The boy stood firm and still.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	boy	boy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	stood	stand	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	firm	firm	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	xcomp	_	_
5	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	still	still	ADV	RB	_	4	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **stand** | past | the boy |  |  |  |  | firm *property* | vn assuming\_position-50 «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:** «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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