---
title: The servant stood by and listened. — Grimms' Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: The servant stood by and listened. Who acts: servant. A sentence of «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, The White Snake, 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/pg2591/34/16/)

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# Grimms' Fairy Tales, The White Snake, sentence 16

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The servant stood by and listened.

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**Who acts:** servant · **What happens:** stand by, listen

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This is a sentence of «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, The White Snake. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (servant), 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:pg2591:34:16
# text = The servant stood by and listened.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	servant	servant	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	stood	stand	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	by	by	ADP	IN	_	3	obl	_	_
5	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	listened	listen	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **stand by** | past | the servant |  |  |  |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **listen** | past | the servant *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn peer-30.3 «NP V PP.theme»: 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:** «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, Project Gutenberg book 2591 (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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