---
title: "Poor little Ephemera!" said the oak; "what a terribly short life!" — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: "Poor little Ephemera!" said the oak; "what a terribly short life!" Who acts: Poor little Ephemera. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Last Dream of the Old Oak, 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/pg27200/69/23/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Last Dream of the Old Oak, sentence 23

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"Poor little Ephemera!" said the oak; "what a terribly short life!"

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**Who acts:** Poor little Ephemera · **What happens:** say · **To what, where:** oak · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Last Dream of the Old Oak. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Poor little Ephemera), 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:pg27200:69:23
# text = "Poor little Ephemera!" said the oak; "what a terribly short life!"
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Poor	poor	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
3	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	Ephemera	ephemera	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
7	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	oak	oak	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	;	;	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
11	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	12	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	7	ccomp	_	_
13	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
14	terribly	terribly	ADV	RB	_	15	advmod	_	_
15	short	short	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	16	amod	_	_
16	life	life	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
17	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	12	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
18	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	12	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | Poor little Ephemera | the oak |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent oak=Topic |

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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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