---
title: They sat stone-still, and their faces were white. — The Jungle Book · tree and pragmatics
description: They sat stone-still, and their faces were white. Who acts: Teddy, faces. A sentence of «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, part 15, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg236/15/4/)

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# The Jungle Book, The Jungle Book, part 15, sentence 4

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They sat stone-still, and their faces were white.

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**Who acts:** Teddy, faces · **What happens:** sit, be · **To what, where:** stone

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This is a sentence of «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, part 15. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Teddy, faces), 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:pg236:15:4
# text = They sat stone-still, and their faces were white.
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	sat	sit	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	stone	stone	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	still	still	ADV	RB	_	2	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
8	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	9	nmod:poss	_	_
9	faces	face	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	nsubj	_	_
10	were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	11	cop	_	_
11	white	white	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	parataxis	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **sit** | past | Teddy | stone |  |  | still |  | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6-1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location stone=Theme |
| 2 | **is** | past | Teddy's faces |  |  |  |  | white *property* | 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 Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, Project Gutenberg book 236 (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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