---
title: Then the grandmother smoothed his hair and told him some more tales. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: Then the grandmother smoothed his hair and told him some more tales. Who acts: grandmother. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, A Little Boy and a Little Girl, 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/pg27200/171/23/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, A Little Boy and a Little Girl, sentence 23

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Then the grandmother smoothed his hair and told him some more tales.

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**Who acts:** grandmother · **What happens:** smooth, tell · **To what, where:** hair, more tales, window · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, A Little Boy and a Little Girl. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (grandmother), 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:pg27200:171:23
# text = Then the grandmother smoothed his hair and told him some more tales.
1	Then	then	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	4	advmod	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	grandmother	grandmother	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	smoothed	smooth	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
6	hair	hair	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	told	tell	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	conj	_	_
9	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	iobj	_	_
10	some	some	DET	DT	PronType=Ind	12	det	_	_
11	more	more	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	12	amod	_	_
12	tales	tale	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **smooth** | past | the grandmother | window's hair |  |  | then |  | vn other\_cos-45.4 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Agent hair=Patient |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | past | the grandmother *not said here* | some more tales | window |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent he=Recipient tale=Topic |

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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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