---
title: The crows had hardly done speaking when away they flew. — The Crimson Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: The crows had hardly done speaking when away they flew. Who acts: crows. A sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 2, 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/pg2435/2/10/)

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# The Crimson Fairy Book, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 2, sentence 10

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The crows had hardly done speaking when away they flew.

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**Who acts:** crows · **What happens:** do, speak, fly · **To what, where:** crows · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 2. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (crows), 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:pg2435:2:10
# text = The crows had hardly done speaking when away they flew.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	crows	crow	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	nsubj:pass	_	_
3	had	have	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	hardly	hardly	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
5	done	do	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	0	root	_	_
6	speaking	speak	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	xcomp	_	_
7	when	when	SCONJ	WRB	_	8	mark	_	_
8	away	away	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
9	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
10	flew	fly	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	8	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **do** | past · perfect · passive |  | the crows |  |  |  | hardly *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **speak** *speech: other* | gerund |  |  |  |  |  | away *property* | vn talk-37.5 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **fly** | past | crows *= crow* |  |  |  |  |  | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6-1 «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 Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 2435 (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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