---
title: But what a kribbling and krabbling was there! — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: But what a kribbling and krabbling was there! A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Drop of Water, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Drop of Water, sentence 10

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But what a kribbling and krabbling was there!

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**What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Drop of Water. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: 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:pg27200:23:10
# text = But what a kribbling and krabbling was there!
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
2	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	8	nsubj	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	kribbling	kribbling	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nsubj	_	_
5	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	krabbling	krabbling	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	conj	_	_
7	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	8	cop	_	_
8	there	there	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | past |  |  |  |  |  | there *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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