---
title: Before her stood a glass bowl containing four gold-fish. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: Before her stood a glass bowl containing four gold-fish. Who acts: light, glass bowl. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Twenty-sixth Evening, 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/pg27200/117/23/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Twenty-sixth Evening, sentence 23

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Before her stood a glass bowl containing four gold-fish.

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**Who acts:** light, glass bowl · **What happens:** stand, contain · **To what, where:** glass bowl, four gold fish

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Twenty-sixth Evening. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (light, glass bowl), 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:pg27200:117:23
# text = Before her stood a glass bowl containing four gold-fish.
1	Before	before	SCONJ	IN	_	3	mark	_	_
2	her	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	stood	stand	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	glass	glass	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	compound	_	_
6	bowl	bowl	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	_
7	containing	contain	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	6	acl	_	_
8	four	four	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	11	nummod	_	_
9	gold	gold	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	compound	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	9	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	fish	fish	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **stand** | past | light | a glass bowl |  |  |  |  | vn admire-31.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer bowl=Stimulus |
| 2 | **contain** | gerund | a glass bowl *not said here* | four gold fish |  |  |  |  | vn comprise-107.2-2 «NP V NP»: agent=Pivot fish=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:** «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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