---
title: Ah! if the poor plant would only live a few days longer! — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: Ah! if the poor plant would only live a few days longer! Who acts: poor plant. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Antonio Canova., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Antonio Canova., sentence 143

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Ah! if the poor plant would only live a few days longer!

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**Who acts:** poor plant · **What happens:** live

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Antonio Canova.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (poor plant), 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:pg18442:54:143
# text = Ah! if the poor plant would only live a few days longer!
1	Ah	ah	INTJ	UH	_	9	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
3	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	9	mark	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	poor	poor	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	plant	plant	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
7	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	9	aux	_	_
8	only	only	ADV	RB	_	9	advmod	_	_
9	live	live	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
11	few	few	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	amod	_	_
12	days	day	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	13	obl:unmarked	_	_
13	longer	long	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	9	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **live** | would | the poor plant |  |  |  |  | long *property* | vn exist-47.1-1 «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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- ← previous: [sentence 142](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/54/142/)
- next →: [sentence 144](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/54/144/)
- ↑ back to [Antonio Canova.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/54/)