---
title: He is ex-act-ly like a wall." — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: He is ex-act-ly like a wall." Who acts: driver. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Blind Men and the Elephant., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Blind Men and the Elephant., sentence 8

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He is ex-act-ly like a wall."

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**Who acts:** driver · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Blind Men and the Elephant.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (driver), 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:pg18442:46:8
# text = He is ex-act-ly like a wall."
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
2	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
3	ex-act-ly	ex-act-ly	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
4	like	like	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	wall	wall	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | present | driver |  |  |  |  | like a wall; ex-act-ly *property* | tree rules |

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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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