---
title: But he had to leave his beautiful bushy tail behind him. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: But he had to leave his beautiful bushy tail behind him. Who acts: Fox. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Fox Without a Tail, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Fox Without a Tail, sentence 2

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But he had to leave his beautiful bushy tail behind him.

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**Who acts:** Fox · **What happens:** have, leave · **To what, where:** beautiful bushy tail

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Fox Without a Tail. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Fox), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg19994:876`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg19994:111:2
# text = But he had to leave his beautiful bushy tail behind him.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	3	cc	_	_
2	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	to	to	PART	TO	_	5	mark	_	_
5	leave	leave	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	xcomp	_	_
6	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	9	nmod:poss	_	_
7	beautiful	beautiful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
8	bushy	bushy	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	tail	tail	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	_
10	behind	behind	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	obl	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **have** | past | Fox |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **leave** | to-infinitive | Fox *not said here* | Fox's beautiful bushy tail |  |  |  | behind Fox | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP PP.location»: agent=Agent tail=Theme behind he=Location |

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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:** «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, Project Gutenberg book 19994 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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