---
title: He tugged and tugged, and tore with his teeth, but could get none off. — Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: He tugged and tugged, and tore with his teeth, but could get none off. Who acts: wolf. A sentence of «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», The Straw Ox, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, The Straw Ox, sentence 29

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He tugged and tugged, and tore with his teeth, but could get none off.

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**Who acts:** wolf · **What happens:** tug, get off · **To what, where:** tore, none

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This is a sentence of «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», The Straw Ox. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (wolf), 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:pg29672:14:29
# text = He tugged and tugged, and tore with his teeth, but could get none off.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	tugged	tug	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	_
4	tugged	tug	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
6	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	7	cc	_	_
7	tore	tore	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	_
8	with	with	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
9	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	10	nmod:poss	_	_
10	teeth	tooth	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	14	punct	_	_
12	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	14	cc	_	_
13	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	14	aux	_	_
14	get	get	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	conj	_	_
15	none	none	PRON	NN	PronType=Neg	14	obj	_	_
16	off	off	ADP	RP	_	14	compound:prt	_	SpaceAfter=No
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tug** | past | wolf |  |  |  |  |  | vn split-23.2 «NP V apart»: agent=Patient |
| 2 | **tug** | past | wolf *not said here* | tore with wolf's teeth |  |  |  |  | vn split-23.2 «NP V apart»: agent=Patient |
| 3 | **get off** | could | wolf *not said here* | none |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer none=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:** «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», Project Gutenberg book 29672 (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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