---
title: They could not pull their feet out of the sticky mass. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: They could not pull their feet out of the sticky mass. Who acts: wings. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Flies and the Honey, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Flies and the Honey, sentence 7

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They could not pull their feet out of the sticky mass.

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**Who acts:** wings · **What happens:** not pull · **To what, where:** feet, sticky mass

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Flies and the Honey. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (wings), 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:pg19994:122:7
# text = They could not pull their feet out of the sticky mass.
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
2	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	pull	pull	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
6	feet	foot	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	_
7	out	out	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
8	of	of	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
9	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
10	sticky	sticky	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	mass	mass	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **pull** | could | wings *= wing* | wings's feet |  | the sticky mass |  |  | vn carry-11.4 «NP V NP PP.initial\_location»: agent=Agent foot=Theme out mass=Initial\_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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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