---
title: The king lay down on the soft grass, and looked up at the white clou… — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: The king lay down on the soft grass, and looked up at the white clouds sailing across the sky. Who acts: king, white clouds. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Maximilian and the Goose Boy., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Maximilian and the Goose Boy., sentence 4

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The king lay down on the soft grass, and looked up at the white clouds sailing across the sky.

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**Who acts:** king, white clouds · **What happens:** lie down, look up, sail · **To what, where:** soft grass, sky

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Maximilian and the Goose Boy.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (king, white clouds), 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:pg18442:47:4
# text = The king lay down on the soft grass, and looked up at the white clouds sailing across the sky.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	king	king	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	lay	lie	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	down	down	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
5	on	on	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
7	soft	soft	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	grass	grass	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
10	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
11	looked	look	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	_
12	up	up	ADP	RP	_	11	compound:prt	_	_
13	at	at	ADP	IN	_	16	case	_	_
14	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
15	white	white	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	16	amod	_	_
16	clouds	cloud	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	obl	_	_
17	sailing	sail	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	16	acl	_	_
18	across	across	ADP	IN	_	20	case	_	_
19	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	20	det	_	_
20	sky	sky	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	17	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
21	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **lie down** | past | the king |  |  | the soft grass |  | down *property* | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent on grass=Location |
| 2 | **look up** | past | the king *not said here* |  |  |  |  | at the white clouds | vn peer-30.3 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent at cloud=Theme |
| 3 | **sail** | gerund | the white clouds *not said here* |  |  | the sky |  |  | vn nonvehicle-51.4.2-1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent across sky=Trajectory |

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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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