---
title: The cow was as beautiful a creature as any cow could be. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: The cow was as beautiful a creature as any cow could be. Who acts: cow, creature. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, What the Old Man Does Is Always Right, 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/pg27200/132/24/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, What the Old Man Does Is Always Right, sentence 24

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The cow was as beautiful a creature as any cow could be.

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**Who acts:** cow, creature · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, What the Old Man Does Is Always Right. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (cow, creature), 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:pg27200:132:24
# text = The cow was as beautiful a creature as any cow could be.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	cow	cow	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
3	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
4	as	as	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
5	beautiful	beautiful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	creature	creature	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj	_	_
8	as	as	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
9	any	any	DET	DT	PronType=Ind	10	det	_	_
10	cow	cow	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nmod	_	_
11	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
12	be	be	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	ccomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | past | the cow |  |  |  |  | beautiful *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **can** | could | a creature as any cow |  |  |  |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «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:** «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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