---
title: But Night sat silent and still. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: But Night sat silent and still. Who acts: Night. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Story of a Mother, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Story of a Mother, sentence 21

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But Night sat silent and still.

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**Who acts:** Night · **What happens:** sit

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Story of a Mother. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Night), 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:pg27200:185:21
# text = But Night sat silent and still.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	3	cc	_	_
2	Night	night	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	sat	sit	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	silent	silent	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	xcomp	_	_
5	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	still	still	ADV	RB	_	3	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **sit** | past | Night |  |  |  |  | silent *property* | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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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