---
title: The spring flood was lifting the ice covering, which brake into a th… — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: The spring flood was lifting the ice covering, which brake into a thousand pieces. Who acts: spring flood, ice. 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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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg27200/177/194/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Snowdrop, sentence 194

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
The spring flood was lifting the ice covering, which brake into a thousand pieces.

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**Who acts:** spring flood, ice · **What happens:** lift, cover, break · **To what, where:** ice, thousand pieces

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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 (spring flood, ice), 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:pg27200:177:194
# text = The spring flood was lifting the ice covering, which brake into a thousand pieces.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	spring	spring	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	compound	_	_
3	flood	flood	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
4	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
5	lifting	lift	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	ice	ice	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	_
8	covering	cover	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	7	acl	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
10	which	which	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	11	nsubj	_	_
11	brake	break	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	8	conj	_	_
12	into	into	ADP	IN	_	15	case	_	_
13	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
14	thousand	thousand	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	15	nummod	_	_
15	pieces	piece	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **lift** | past · progressive | the spring flood | the ice |  |  |  |  | vn put\_direction-9.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent ice=Theme |
| 2 | **cover** | gerund | the ice *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn fill-9.8-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Theme |
| 3 | **break** | present |  |  |  |  |  | into thousand pieces *result* | vn break-45.1 «NP V PP.result»: agent=Patient into piece=Result |

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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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