---
title: To his delight it seemed thick and stout. — The Brown Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: To his delight it seemed thick and stout. Who acts: it, cat. A sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 29, 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/pg3282/29/23/)

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# The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 29, sentence 23

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To his delight it seemed thick and stout.

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**Who acts:** it, cat · **What happens:** seem, delight

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This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 29. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (it, cat), 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:pg3282:29:23
# text = To his delight it seemed thick and stout.
1	To	to	ADP	IN	_	3	case	_	_
2	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	3	nmod:poss	_	_
3	delight	delight	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	_
4	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
5	seemed	seem	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	thick	thick	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	xcomp	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	stout	stout	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **seem** | past | it |  |  |  |  | to cat's delight; thick *property* | vn seem-109-1-1-1 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **delight** |  | cat |  |  |  |  |  | nom delight «feeling intransitive»: poss=agent |

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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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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