---
title: I can crack shells. — Just so stories · tree and pragmatics
description: I can crack shells. Who acts: I. A sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, The Crab That Played With the Sea, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Just so stories, The Crab That Played With the Sea, sentence 115

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I can crack shells.

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** crack · **To what, where:** shells

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This is a sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, The Crab That Played With the Sea. 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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**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:pg2781:11:115
# text = I can crack shells.
1	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	crack	crack	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	shells	shell	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **crack** | can | I | shells |  |  |  |  | vn sound\_emission-43.2 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location shell=Theme |

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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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