---
title: What a fine dinner they would be for a starving horse! — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: What a fine dinner they would be for a starving horse! Who acts: fine dinner. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Bell of Atri., 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/pg18442/25/59/)

<!-- 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/) / [Fifty Famous Stories Retold](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/) / [The Bell of Atri.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/25/) / 59

# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Bell of Atri., sentence 59

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
What a fine dinner they would be for a starving horse!

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** fine dinner · **What happens:** starve, be

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Bell of Atri.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (fine dinner), 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:pg18442:25:59
# text = What a fine dinner they would be for a starving horse!
1	What	what	DET	WDT	PronType=Int	4	det:predet	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	fine	fine	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	dinner	dinner	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	nsubj	_	_
5	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	_
6	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	11	aux	_	_
7	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	11	cop	_	_
8	for	for	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
9	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
10	starving	starve	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	11	amod	_	_
11	horse	horse	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	11	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **starve** | gerund |  |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **is** | would | what fine dinner |  |  |  |  | for a starving horse | tree rules |

<!-- .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:** «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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 58](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/25/58/)
- next →: [sentence 60](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/25/60/)
- ↑ back to [The Bell of Atri.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/25/)