---
title: ‘Er-hm!’ said Tegumai, looking up. — Just so stories · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Er-hm!’ said Tegumai, looking up. Who acts: hm. A sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, How the Alphabet Was Made, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Just so stories, How the Alphabet Was Made, sentence 170

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‘Er-hm!’ said Tegumai, looking up.

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**Who acts:** hm · **What happens:** say, look up · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, How the Alphabet Was Made. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (hm), 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:pg2781:10:170
# text = ‘Er-hm!’ said Tegumai, looking up.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Er	er	INTJ	UH	_	7	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	hm	hm	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	Tegumai	Tegumai	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
10	looking	look	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	7	advcl	_	_
11	up	up	ADP	RP	_	10	compound:prt	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	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 | hm |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **look up** | gerund | hm *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn stimulus\_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus |

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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:** «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, Project Gutenberg book 2781 (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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