---
title: He shook his head. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: He shook his head. Who acts: son. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, V. the Fortune., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/53/56/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [Fifty Famous Stories Retold](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/) / [V. the Fortune.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/53/) / 56

# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, V. the Fortune., sentence 56

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
He shook his head.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** son · **What happens:** shake · **To what, where:** head

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, V. the Fortune.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (son), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg18442:53:56
# text = He shook his head.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	shook	shake	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	4	nmod:poss	_	_
4	head	head	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **shake** | past | son | son's head |  |  |  |  | vn shake-22.3-2 «NP V NP together»: agent=Agent head=Patient |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 55](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/53/55/)
- next →: [sentence 57](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/53/57/)
- ↑ back to [V. the Fortune.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/53/)