---
title: It almost looks like a great plateful of spiders jumping about in a… — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: It almost looks like a great plateful of spiders jumping about in a crowd. Who acts: glass, spiders. 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 4

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It almost looks like a great plateful of spiders jumping about in a crowd.

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**Who acts:** glass, spiders · **What happens:** look, jump

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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: who acts (glass, spiders), 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:pg27200:23:4
# text = It almost looks like a great plateful of spiders jumping about in a crowd.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	almost	almost	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
3	looks	look	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	like	like	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
6	great	great	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	plateful	plateful	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	_
8	of	of	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
9	spiders	spider	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nmod	_	_
10	jumping	jump	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	9	acl	_	_
11	about	about	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
12	in	in	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
13	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
14	crowd	crowd	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **look** | present | glass |  |  |  |  | like a great plateful of spiders; almost *property* | vn stimulus\_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus |
| 2 | **jump** | gerund | spiders *not said here* |  |  |  |  | about a crowd | vn run-51.3.2-2-1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme about crowd=Trajectory |

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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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