---
title: "Making music, were you?" they cried. " — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: "Making music, were you?" they cried. " Who acts: Ants. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Ants and the Grasshopper, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Ants and the Grasshopper, sentence 6

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"Making music, were you?" they cried. "

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**Who acts:** Ants · **What happens:** make, be, cry · **To what, where:** music, you · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Ants and the Grasshopper. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Ants), 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:pg19994:34:6
# text = "Making music, were you?" they cried. "
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Making	make	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
3	music	music	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
5	were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
6	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
9	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
10	cried	cry	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	parataxis	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
12	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **make** *in a quote* | gerund |  | music |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **is a** *in a quote* | past |  | you |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **cry** *speech: express* | past | Ants *= ant* |  |  |  |  |  | vn manner\_speaking-37.3 «NP V»: 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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