---
title: She was sinking. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: She was sinking. Who acts: sun. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The White Ship., 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/pg18442/7/21/)

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The White Ship., sentence 21

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She was sinking.

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**Who acts:** sun · **What happens:** sink

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The White Ship.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (sun), 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:pg18442:7:21
# text = She was sinking.
1	She	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	sinking	sink	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **sink** | past · progressive | sun |  |  |  |  |  | vn other\_cos-45.4 «NP.patient V»: agent=Patient |

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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 20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/7/20/)
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