---
title: The road led across a treeless plain where the Sun beat down fiercely. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: The road led across a treeless plain where the Sun beat down fiercely. Who acts: road, Sun. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Ass and Its Shadow, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Ass and Its Shadow, sentence 3

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The road led across a treeless plain where the Sun beat down fiercely.

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**Who acts:** road, Sun · **What happens:** lead, beat down · **To what, where:** treeless plain

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Ass and Its Shadow. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (road, 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:pg19994:133:3
# text = The road led across a treeless plain where the Sun beat down fiercely.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	road	road	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	led	lead	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	across	across	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
6	treeless	treeless	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	plain	plain	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	_
8	where	where	ADV	WRB	PronType=Rel	11	advmod	_	_
9	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	Sun	Sun	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	11	nsubj	_	_
11	beat	beat	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	acl:relcl	_	_
12	down	down	ADV	RB	_	13	advmod	_	_
13	fiercely	fiercely	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **lead** | past | the road |  |  | a treeless plain |  |  | vn accompany-51.7 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent across plain=Destination |
| 2 | **beat down** | present | the Sun |  |  |  |  | fiercely *property* | vn sound\_emission-43.2 «NP.location V PP.theme»: agent=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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