---
title: And a little ant at once began to crawl over the high wall. — The Orange Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: And a little ant at once began to crawl over the high wall. Who acts: little ant. A sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 26, 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/pg3027/26/18/)

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# The Orange Fairy Book, Opening, part 26, sentence 18

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And a little ant at once began to crawl over the high wall.

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**Who acts:** little ant · **What happens:** begin, crawl · **To what, where:** high wall

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This is a sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 26. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (little ant), 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:pg3027:26:18
# text = And a little ant at once began to crawl over the high wall.
1	And	and	CCONJ	CC	_	7	cc	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	ant	ant	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
5	at	at	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
6	once	once	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Mult	7	obl	_	_
7	began	begin	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
8	to	to	PART	TO	_	9	mark	_	_
9	crawl	crawl	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	7	xcomp	_	_
10	over	over	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
11	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
12	high	high	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	amod	_	_
13	wall	wall	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **begin** | past | a little ant |  |  |  |  |  | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality |
| 2 | **crawl** | to-infinitive | a little ant *not said here* |  |  | the high wall |  |  | vn run-51.3.2 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme over wall=Trajectory |

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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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