---
title: No one could be happier than we should be." — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: No one could be happier than we should be." Who acts: one. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Top and Ball, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Top and Ball, sentence 8

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No one could be happier than we should be."

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

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Top and Ball. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (one), 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:pg27200:195:8
# text = No one could be happier than we should be."
1	No	no	DET	DT	PronType=Neg	2	det	_	_
2	one	one	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
3	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	cop	_	_
5	happier	happy	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	0	root	_	_
6	than	than	SCONJ	IN	_	9	mark	_	_
7	we	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	9	nsubj	_	_
8	should	should	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	9	aux	_	_
9	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | could | no one |  |  |  |  | happy *property* | tree rules |

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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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