---
title: He had no chance to bite the watchful Countryman. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: He had no chance to bite the watchful Countryman. Who acts: Serpent. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Serpent and the Eagle, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Serpent and the Eagle, sentence 8

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He had no chance to bite the watchful Countryman.

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**Who acts:** Serpent · **What happens:** have, bite · **To what, where:** chance, watchful Countryman

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Serpent and the Eagle. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Serpent), 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:pg19994:96:8
# text = He had no chance to bite the watchful Countryman.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	no	no	DET	DT	PronType=Neg	4	det	_	_
4	chance	chance	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
5	to	to	PART	TO	_	6	mark	_	_
6	bite	bite	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	acl	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	watchful	watchful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	Countryman	countryman	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **have** | past | Serpent | no chance |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent chance=Patient |
| 2 | **bite** | to-infinitive | Serpent *not said here* | the watchful Countryman |  |  |  |  | vn swat-18.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent countryman=Patient |

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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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