---
title: On the back seat a little smart groom balanced himself. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: On the back seat a little smart groom balanced himself. Who acts: little smart groom. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Dryad, part 1, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg27200/24/52/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Dryad, part 1, sentence 52

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On the back seat a little smart groom balanced himself.

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**Who acts:** little smart groom · **What happens:** balance · **To what, where:** groom, back seat

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Dryad, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (little smart groom), 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:pg27200:24:52
# text = On the back seat a little smart groom balanced himself.
1	On	on	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	back	back	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	compound	_	_
4	seat	seat	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obl	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
6	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
7	smart	smart	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	groom	groom	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
9	balanced	balance	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
10	himself	himself	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs|Reflex=Yes	9	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **balance** | past | a little smart groom | groom |  | the back seat |  |  | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V NP.theme PP»: agent=Agent himself=Theme on seat=Location |

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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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