---
title: Were they each nothing or something? — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: Were they each nothing or something? Who acts: brothers. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Snowdrop, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Snowdrop, sentence 119

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Were they each nothing or something?

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**Who acts:** brothers · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Snowdrop. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (brothers), 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:pg27200:177:119
# text = Were they each nothing or something?
1	Were	be	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	1	nsubj	_	_
3	each	each	DET	DT	PronType=Tot	4	det	_	_
4	nothing	nothing	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Neg	1	nsubj	_	_
5	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	something	something	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	4	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **be** | past | brothers *= brother* |  |  |  |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

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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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