---
title: The Fox saw a slender chance of escape. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: The Fox saw a slender chance of escape. Who acts: Fox, escape. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Cock and the Fox, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Cock and the Fox, sentence 5

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The Fox saw a slender chance of escape.

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**Who acts:** Fox, escape · **What happens:** see, chance · **To what, where:** slender chance

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Cock and the Fox. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Fox, escape), 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:pg19994:1190`): 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:pg19994:146:5
# text = The Fox saw a slender chance of escape.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	Fox	fox	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	saw	see	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	slender	slender	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	chance	chance	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	_
7	of	of	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	escape	escape	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	_
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **see** | past | the Fox | a slender chance of escape |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer chance=Stimulus |
| 2 | **chance** |  | escape |  |  |  |  |  | nom chance «state intransitive»: of=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:** 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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