---
title: Then Canute took off his crown, and threw it down upon the sand. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: Then Canute took off his crown, and threw it down upon the sand. Who acts: Canute. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, King Canute on the Seashore., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/5/25/)

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, King Canute on the Seashore., sentence 25

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Then Canute took off his crown, and threw it down upon the sand.

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**Who acts:** Canute · **What happens:** take off, throw down, crown · **To what, where:** crown, sand

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, King Canute on the Seashore.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Canute), 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:pg18442:5:25
# text = Then Canute took off his crown, and threw it down upon the sand.
1	Then	then	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	3	advmod	_	_
2	Canute	Canute	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	took	take	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	off	off	ADP	RP	_	3	compound:prt	_	_
5	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
6	crown	crown	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
9	threw	throw	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	_
10	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	9	obj	_	_
11	down	down	ADP	RP	_	9	compound:prt	_	_
12	upon	upon	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
13	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
14	sand	sand	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **take off** | past | Canute | Canute's crown |  |  | then |  | vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent crown=Theme |
| 2 | **throw down** | past | Canute *not said here* | crown |  | the sand |  |  | vn throw-17.1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.destinations»: agent=Agent it=Theme upon sand=Destination |
| 3 | **crown** |  | Canute |  |  |  |  |  | nom crown «communication transitive»: poss=agent |

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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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