---
title: "But flowers cannot dance?" cried little Ida. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: "But flowers cannot dance?" cried little Ida. Who acts: flowers, little Ida. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Little Ida's Flowers, 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/pg27200/73/6/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Little Ida's Flowers, sentence 6

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"But flowers cannot dance?" cried little Ida.

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**Who acts:** flowers, little Ida · **What happens:** not dance, cry · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Little Ida's Flowers. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (flowers, little Ida), 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:pg27200:73:6
# text = "But flowers cannot dance?" cried little Ida.
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
3	flowers	flower	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
4	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
6	dance	dance	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	9	ccomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
9	cried	cry	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
10	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	Ida	Ida	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	9	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **dance** *in a quote* | can | flowers |  |  |  |  |  | vn modes\_of\_being\_with\_motion-47.3 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **cry** *speech: express* | past | little Ida |  |  |  |  |  | vn manner\_speaking-37.3 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=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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