---
title: Some fishing boats were in sight, but they were too far off to be of… — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: Some fishing boats were in sight, but they were too far off to be of any use. Who acts: fishing boats, Clara. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, A Story From the Sand-hills, part 5, 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/pg27200/162/41/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, A Story From the Sand-hills, part 5, sentence 41

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Some fishing boats were in sight, but they were too far off to be of any use.

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**Who acts:** fishing boats, Clara · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** sight

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, A Story From the Sand-hills, part 5. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (fishing boats, Clara), 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:pg27200:162:41
# text = Some fishing boats were in sight, but they were too far off to be of any use.
1	Some	some	DET	DT	PronType=Ind	3	det	_	_
2	fishing	fishing	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	compound	_	_
3	boats	boat	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
4	were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
5	in	in	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
6	sight	sight	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	13	punct	_	_
8	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	13	cc	_	_
9	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	13	nsubj	_	_
10	were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	13	cop	_	_
11	too	too	ADV	RB	_	12	advmod	_	_
12	far	far	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	13	advmod	_	_
13	off	off	ADV	RB	_	6	conj	_	_
14	to	to	PART	TO	_	18	mark	_	_
15	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	18	cop	_	_
16	of	of	ADP	IN	_	18	case	_	_
17	any	any	DET	DT	PronType=Ind	18	det	_	_
18	use	use	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | past | some fishing boats |  |  | sight |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **is** | past | Clara |  |  |  |  | far, off *property* | tree rules |
| 3 | **is** | to-infinitive | Clara *not said here* |  |  |  |  | of any use | tree rules |

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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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