---
title: A strong chain kept it from floating away. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: A strong chain kept it from floating away. Who acts: strong chain. 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 8

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A strong chain kept it from floating away.

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**Who acts:** strong chain · **What happens:** keep, float away · **To what, where:** buoy

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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 (strong chain), 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:pg18442:48:8
# text = A strong chain kept it from floating away.
1	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	strong	strong	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	chain	chain	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	kept	keep	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	obj	_	_
6	from	from	SCONJ	IN	_	7	mark	_	_
7	floating	float	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	4	advcl	_	_
8	away	away	ADV	RB	_	7	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **keep** | past | a strong chain | buoy |  |  |  |  | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Theme |
| 2 | **float away** | gerund | a strong chain *not said here* |  |  |  |  | away *property* | vn run-51.3.2-2 «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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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