---
title: The buoy floated back and forth in the shallow water. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: The buoy floated back and forth in the shallow water. Who acts: buoy. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Inchcape Rock., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Inchcape Rock., sentence 7

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The buoy floated back and forth in the shallow water.

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**Who acts:** buoy · **What happens:** float · **To what, where:** shallow water

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Inchcape Rock.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (buoy), 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:pg18442:48:7
# text = The buoy floated back and forth in the shallow water.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	buoy	buoy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	floated	float	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	back	back	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
5	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	forth	forth	ADV	RB	_	4	conj	_	_
7	in	in	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
9	shallow	shallow	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	water	water	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **float** | past | the buoy |  |  | the shallow water |  |  | vn run-51.3.2-2 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme in water=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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