---
title: Your black stiff quills are not worth having. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: Your black stiff quills are not worth having. Who acts: black stiff quills. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Swallow and the Crow, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Swallow and the Crow, sentence 3

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Your black stiff quills are not worth having.

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**Who acts:** black stiff quills · **What happens:** not be, have

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Swallow and the Crow. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (black stiff quills), 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:pg19994:138:3
# text = Your black stiff quills are not worth having.
1	Your	your	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	4	nmod:poss	_	_
2	black	black	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
3	stiff	stiff	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	quills	quill	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nsubj	_	_
5	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
6	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	7	advmod	_	_
7	worth	worth	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
8	having	have	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	7	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **is** | present | Your black stiff quills |  |  |  |  | worth *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **have** | gerund | Your black stiff quills *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |

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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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