---
title: "What are those swans flapping their wings for?" — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: "What are those swans flapping their wings for?" Who acts: swans. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Marsh King's Daughter, part 5, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Marsh King's Daughter, part 5, sentence 100

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"What are those swans flapping their wings for?"

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**Who acts:** swans · **What happens:** flap · **To what, where:** wings

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Marsh King's Daughter, part 5. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (swans), 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:pg27200:87:100
# text = "What are those swans flapping their wings for?"
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	6	obj	_	_
3	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
4	those	that	DET	DT	Number=Plur|PronType=Dem	5	det	_	_
5	swans	swan	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
6	flapping	flap	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
7	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	wings	wing	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obj	_	_
9	for	for	ADP	IN	_	6	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **flap** *in a quote* | present · progressive | that swans | flocks's wings |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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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