---
title: The tyrant laughed at him. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: The tyrant laughed at him. Who acts: tyrant. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Damon and Pythias., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Damon and Pythias., sentence 5

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The tyrant laughed at him.

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**Who acts:** tyrant · **What happens:** laugh

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Damon and Pythias.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (tyrant), 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:pg18442:34:5
# text = The tyrant laughed at him.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	tyrant	tyrant	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	laughed	laugh	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	at	at	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
5	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **laugh** | past | the tyrant |  |  |  |  | at man | vn nonverbal\_expression-40.2 «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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