---
title: A Cat was growing very thin. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: A Cat was growing very thin. Who acts: Cat. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Cat and the Birds, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Cat and the Birds, sentence 1

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A Cat was growing very thin.

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**Who acts:** Cat · **What happens:** grow

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Cat and the Birds. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Cat), 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:pg19994:89:1
# text = A Cat was growing very thin.
1	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	Cat	cat	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
3	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
4	growing	grow	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
5	very	very	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
6	thin	thin	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **grow** | past · progressive | a Cat |  |  |  |  | thin *property* | vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

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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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