---
title: It said a quarter to three. — The Book of Dragons · tree and pragmatics
description: It said a quarter to three. Who acts: watch. A sentence of «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Kind Little Edmund], with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Book of Dragons, Kind Little Edmund\], sentence 83

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It said a quarter to three.

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**Who acts:** watch · **What happens:** say · **To what, where:** quarter, three · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Kind Little Edmund\]. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (watch), 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:pg23661:14:83
# text = It said a quarter to three.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	quarter	quarter	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
5	to	to	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
6	three	three	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | watch | a quarter | three |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP PP.recipient»: agent=Agent quarter=Topic to three=Recipient |

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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 Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Project Gutenberg book 23661 (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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