---
title: Picking up some small pebbles, he dropped them into the pitcher one… — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: Picking up some small pebbles, he dropped them into the pitcher one by one. Who acts: idea. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Crow and the Pitcher, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Crow and the Pitcher, sentence 5

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Picking up some small pebbles, he dropped them into the pitcher one by one.

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**Who acts:** idea · **What happens:** pick up, drop · **To what, where:** small pebbles, pebbles, pitcher

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Crow and the Pitcher. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (idea), 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:pg19994:264`): 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:pg19994:33:5
# text = Picking up some small pebbles, he dropped them into the pitcher one by one.
1	Picking	pick	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	8	advcl	_	_
2	up	up	ADP	RP	_	1	compound:prt	_	_
3	some	some	DET	DT	PronType=Ind	5	det	_	_
4	small	small	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	pebbles	pebble	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	1	obj	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	1	punct	_	_
7	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
8	dropped	drop	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	obj	_	_
10	into	into	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
11	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	pitcher	pitcher	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obl	_	_
13	one	one	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	8	obl:unmarked	_	_
14	by	by	ADP	IN	_	15	case	_	_
15	one	one	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	13	nmod	_	_
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **pick up** | gerund | idea *not said here* | some small pebbles |  |  |  |  | vn discover-84-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent pebble=Topic |
| 2 | **drop** | past | idea | pebbles *= pebble* |  | the pitcher |  | one by one *obl:unmarked* | vn put\_direction-9.4 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent they=Theme into pitcher=Destination |

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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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