---
title: It was a terrible battle. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: It was a terrible battle. Who acts: Owl. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat, sentence 6

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It was a terrible battle.

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**Who acts:** Owl · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** terrible battle

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Owl), 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:pg19994:45:6
# text = It was a terrible battle.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	terrible	terrible	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	battle	battle	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | past | Owl | a terrible battle |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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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