---
title: The smile faded from the lips of Damocles. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: The smile faded from the lips of Damocles. Who acts: smile. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Sword of Damocles., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Sword of Damocles., sentence 22

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The smile faded from the lips of Damocles.

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**Who acts:** smile · **What happens:** fade · **To what, where:** lips

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Sword of Damocles.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (smile), 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:pg18442:33:22
# text = The smile faded from the lips of Damocles.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	smile	smile	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	faded	fade	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	from	from	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	lips	lip	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obl	_	_
7	of	of	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	Damocles	Damocles	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **fade** | past | the smile |  |  | the lips of Damocles |  |  | vn other\_cos-45.4 «NP.patient V»: agent=Patient |

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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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