---
title: The ephemeral fly knows not repose, for her existence is flight. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: The ephemeral fly knows not repose, for her existence is flight. Who acts: ephemeral fly, existence, fly. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Dryad, part 2, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Dryad, part 2, sentence 137

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The ephemeral fly knows not repose, for her existence is flight.

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**Who acts:** ephemeral fly, existence, fly · **What happens:** not know, be, exist · **To what, where:** repose, flight

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Dryad, part 2. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (ephemeral fly, existence, fly), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg27200:1744`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg27200:25:137
# text = The ephemeral fly knows not repose, for her existence is flight.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	ephemeral	ephemeral	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	fly	fly	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	knows	know	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
6	repose	repose	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
8	for	for	SCONJ	IN	_	12	mark	_	_
9	her	her	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	10	nmod:poss	_	_
10	existence	existence	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj	_	_
11	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	cop	_	_
12	flight	flight	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	advcl	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **know** | present | the ephemeral fly | repose |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Experiencer repose=Stimulus |
| 2 | **is a** | present | fly's existence | flight |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **exist** |  | fly |  |  |  |  |  | nom existence «state intransitive»: poss=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:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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