---
title: It takes years to acquire great knowledge. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: It takes years to acquire great knowledge. Who acts: It. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, What the First Little Mouse Saw and Heard on Her Travels, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, What the First Little Mouse Saw and Heard on Her Travels, sentence 2

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It takes years to acquire great knowledge.

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**Who acts:** It · **What happens:** take, acquire · **To what, where:** great knowledge

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, What the First Little Mouse Saw and Heard on Her Travels. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (It), 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:pg27200:179:2
# text = It takes years to acquire great knowledge.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	takes	take	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	years	year	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obj	_	_
4	to	to	PART	TO	_	5	mark	_	_
5	acquire	acquire	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	advcl	_	_
6	great	great	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	knowledge	knowledge	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **take** | present | It |  |  |  | year |  | vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **acquire** | to-infinitive |  | great knowledge |  |  |  |  | vn obtain-13.5.2-1 «NP.asset V NP»: agent=Asset knowledge=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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