---
title: I sat in the soft moss, and held my sausage skewer tight. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: I sat in the soft moss, and held my sausage skewer tight. Who acts: I. 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 23

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I sat in the soft moss, and held my sausage skewer tight.

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** sit, hold · **To what, where:** soft moss, sausage

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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 (I), 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:pg27200:179:23
# text = I sat in the soft moss, and held my sausage skewer tight.
1	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	sat	sit	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	in	in	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	soft	soft	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	moss	moss	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
9	held	hold	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
10	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	11	nmod:poss	_	_
11	sausage	sausage	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obj	_	_
12	skewer	skew	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	11	amod	_	_
13	tight	tight	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **sit** | past | I |  |  | the soft moss |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent in moss=Location |
| 2 | **hold** | past | I *not said here* | my sausage |  |  |  |  | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent sausage=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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