---
title: What song could the buttercups sing? — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: What song could the buttercups sing? Who acts: song buttercups. 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.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg27200/172/114/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg27200/) / [The Flower Garden of the Woman Who Cou…](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg27200/172/) / 114

# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Flower Garden of the Woman Who Could Conjure, sentence 114

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
What song could the buttercups sing?

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** song buttercups · **What happens:** sing

<!-- .vabout -->
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 (song buttercups), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg27200:172:114
# text = What song could the buttercups sing?
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	6	obj	_	_
2	song	song	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	compound	_	_
3	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	buttercups	buttercup	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
6	sing	sing	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **sing** *speech: express* | infinitive | the song buttercups |  |  |  |  |  | vn sound\_emission-43.2 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location what=Theme |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 113](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg27200/172/113/)
- next →: [sentence 115](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg27200/172/115/)
- ↑ back to [The Flower Garden of the Woman Who Could Conjure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg27200/172/)