---
title: Soon the Persian soldiers were seen coming. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: Soon the Persian soldiers were seen coming. Who acts: Persian soldiers. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Brave Three Hundred., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Brave Three Hundred., sentence 11

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Soon the Persian soldiers were seen coming.

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**Who acts:** Persian soldiers · **What happens:** see, come · **To what, where:** Persian soldiers

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Brave Three Hundred.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Persian soldiers), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg18442:1147`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg18442:39:11
# text = Soon the Persian soldiers were seen coming.
1	Soon	soon	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	6	advmod	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	Persian	Persian	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	soldiers	soldier	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj:pass	_	_
5	were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	aux:pass	_	_
6	seen	see	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	0	root	_	_
7	coming	come	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	6	xcomp	_	_
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **see** | past · passive |  | the Persian soldiers |  |  |  | soon *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **come** | gerund | the Persian soldiers *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

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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:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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