---
title: The fire-flies flew lightly over them, like little floating torches. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: The fire-flies flew lightly over them, like little floating torches. Who acts: fire flies. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Flower Garden of the Woman Who Could Conjure, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Flower Garden of the Woman Who Could Conjure, sentence 101

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The fire-flies flew lightly over them, like little floating torches.

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**Who acts:** fire flies · **What happens:** fly

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Flower Garden of the Woman Who Could Conjure. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (fire flies), 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:pg27200:172:101
# text = The fire-flies flew lightly over them, like little floating torches.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
2	fire	fire	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	compound	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	flies	fly	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	nsubj	_	_
5	flew	fly	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	lightly	lightly	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
7	over	over	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	13	punct	_	_
10	like	like	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
11	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	amod	_	_
12	floating	floating	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	compound	_	_
13	torches	torch	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **fly** | past | the fire flies |  |  |  |  | over dresses *= dress*; lightly *property* | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V NP.theme PP»: agent=Agent over they=Location |

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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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