---
title: And he could not help laughing. ' — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: And he could not help laughing. ' Who acts: ugliness. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Fifteenth Evening, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Fifteenth Evening, sentence 14

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And he could not help laughing. '

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**Who acts:** ugliness · **What happens:** not help, laugh

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Fifteenth Evening. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (ugliness), 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:pg27200:106:14
# text = And he could not help laughing. '
1	And	and	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
2	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
3	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	5	advmod	_	_
5	help	help	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
6	laughing	laugh	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
8	'	'	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **help** | could | ugliness |  |  |  |  |  | vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V NP S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Theme |
| 2 | **laugh** *not said to happen* | gerund | ugliness *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn nonverbal\_expression-40.2 «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:** «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Project Gutenberg book 27200 (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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