---
title: What a hunt there was for that kitten, to be sure! — The Brown Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: What a hunt there was for that kitten, to be sure! Who acts: hunt. A sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 27, 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/pg3282/27/111/)

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# The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 27, sentence 111

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What a hunt there was for that kitten, to be sure!

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**Who acts:** hunt · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 27. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (hunt), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg3282:2462`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg3282:27:111
# text = What a hunt there was for that kitten, to be sure!
1	What	what	DET	WDT	PronType=Int	3	det:predet	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	hunt	hunt	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
4	there	there	PRON	EX	_	5	expl	_	_
5	was	be	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	for	for	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
7	that	that	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	8	det	_	_
8	kitten	kitten	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nmod	_	_
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
10	to	to	PART	TO	_	12	mark	_	_
11	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	12	cop	_	_
12	sure	sure	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	parataxis	_	_
13	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **be** | past | what hunt for that kitten |  |  | there |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **is** | to-infinitive |  |  |  |  |  | sure *property* | tree rules |

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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 Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3282 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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