---
title: So that these people had never seen anyone cry before. — The Book of Dragons · tree and pragmatics
description: So that these people had never seen anyone cry before. Who acts: people, anyone. A sentence of «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Opening, part 8, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Book of Dragons, Opening, part 8, sentence 72

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So that these people had never seen anyone cry before.

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**Who acts:** people, anyone · **What happens:** not see, cry · **To what, where:** anyone

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This is a sentence of «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Opening, part 8. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (people, anyone), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg23661:761`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg23661:8:72
# text = So that these people had never seen anyone cry before.
1	So	so	ADV	RB	_	7	advmod	_	_
2	that	that	SCONJ	IN	_	7	mark	_	_
3	these	this	DET	DT	Number=Plur|PronType=Dem	4	det	_	_
4	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nsubj	_	_
5	had	have	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
6	never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	7	advmod	_	_
7	seen	see	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
8	anyone	anyone	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	7	obj	_	_
9	cry	cry	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	7	xcomp	_	_
10	before	before	ADV	RB	_	9	advmod	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **see** | past · perfect | this people | anyone |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **cry** *speech: express* | infinitive | anyone *not said here* |  |  |  |  | before *property* | vn manner\_speaking-37.3 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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