---
title: But a very few days of wandering opened their eyes. — The Orange Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: But a very few days of wandering opened their eyes. Who acts: few days. A sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 16, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg3027/16/38/)

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# The Orange Fairy Book, Opening, part 16, sentence 38

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But a very few days of wandering opened their eyes.

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**Who acts:** few days · **What happens:** open · **To what, where:** eyes

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This is a sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 16. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (few days), 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:pg3027:16:38
# text = But a very few days of wandering opened their eyes.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
3	very	very	ADV	RB	_	4	advmod	_	_
4	few	few	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	days	day	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	nsubj	_	_
6	of	of	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
7	wandering	wandering	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nmod	_	_
8	opened	open	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	10	nmod:poss	_	_
10	eyes	eye	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **open** | past | a few days of wandering | spirits's eyes |  |  |  |  | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6-1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location eye=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:** «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3027 (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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