---
title: They were curious to know how this flight would end. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: They were curious to know how this flight would end. Who acts: birds, flight. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Philosopher's Stone, 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/pg27200/143/160/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Philosopher's Stone, sentence 160

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They were curious to know how this flight would end.

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**Who acts:** birds, flight · **What happens:** be, know, end · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Philosopher's Stone. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (birds, flight), 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:pg27200:143:160
# text = They were curious to know how this flight would end.
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	cop	_	_
3	curious	curious	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
4	to	to	PART	TO	_	5	mark	_	_
5	know	know	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	csubj	_	_
6	how	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	10	advmod	_	_
7	this	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	8	det	_	_
8	flight	flight	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
9	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	10	aux	_	_
10	end	end	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	ccomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | past | birds *= bird* |  |  |  |  | curious *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **know** | to-infinitive |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V how S\_INF»: agent=Experiencer clause=Stimulus |
| 3 | **end** | would | this flight |  |  |  |  |  | vn stop-55.4-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality |

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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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