---
title: _Borrowed feathers do not make fine birds. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: _Borrowed feathers do not make fine birds. Who acts: Borrowed feathers. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Vain Jackdaw and His Borrowed Feathers, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Vain Jackdaw and His Borrowed Feathers, sentence 13

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\_Borrowed feathers do not make fine birds.

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**Who acts:** Borrowed feathers · **What happens:** borrow, not make · **To what, where:** fine birds

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Vain Jackdaw and His Borrowed Feathers. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Borrowed feathers), 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:pg19994:60:13
# text = _Borrowed feathers do not make fine birds.
1	_	_	PUNCT	NFP	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Borrowed	borrow	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	3	amod	_	_
3	feathers	feather	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
4	do	do	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
5	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
6	make	make	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	fine	fine	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	birds	bird	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **borrow** | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn obtain-13.5.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **not** **make** | present · do-support | Borrowed feathers | fine birds |  |  |  |  | vn build-26.1-1 «NP.asset V NP»: agent=Asset bird=Product |

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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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