---
title: Porpoises went snorting past in bands and clans. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Porpoises went snorting past in bands and clans. Who acts: Porpoises. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter V, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter V, sentence 9

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Porpoises went snorting past in bands and clans.

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**Who acts:** Porpoises · **What happens:** go, snort

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter V. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Porpoises), 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:pg2892:66:9
# text = Porpoises went snorting past in bands and clans.
1	Porpoises	porpoise	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	went	go	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	snorting	snort	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	2	xcomp	_	_
4	past	past	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
5	in	in	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
6	bands	band	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obl	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	clans	clan	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **go** | past | Porpoises |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7 «NP V S-Quote»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **snort** | gerund | Porpoises *not said here* |  |  |  |  | in bands and clans; past *property* | vn nonverbal\_expression-40.2 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent in band=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:** «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Project Gutenberg book 2892 (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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