---
title: Why was not I lying on a lap and travelling in a coach? — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: Why was not I lying on a lap and travelling in a coach? Who acts: I. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, II. the Journey to the New Home, 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/pg27200/53/16/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, II. the Journey to the New Home, sentence 16

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Why was not I lying on a lap and travelling in a coach?

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** not lie, travel · **To what, where:** lap, coach

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, II. the Journey to the New Home. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), 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:pg27200:4012`): 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:pg27200:53:16
# text = Why was not I lying on a lap and travelling in a coach?
1	Why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	5	advmod	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	5	advmod	_	_
4	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
5	lying	lie	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
6	on	on	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	lap	lap	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	travelling	travel	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	5	conj	_	_
11	in	in	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
12	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	coach	coach	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obl	_	_
14	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **lie** | past · progressive | I |  |  | a lap |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent on lap=Location |
| 2 | **travel** | gerund | I *not said here* |  |  | a coach |  |  | vn run-51.3.2-1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme in coach=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:** 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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