---
title: In little puffs Patkasa laughed uneasily. — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: In little puffs Patkasa laughed uneasily. Who acts: Patkasa. A sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Iktomi and the Turtle, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Old Indian Legends, Iktomi and the Turtle, sentence 22

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In little puffs Patkasa laughed uneasily.

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**Who acts:** Patkasa · **What happens:** laugh

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This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Iktomi and the Turtle. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Patkasa), 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:pg338:10:22
# text = In little puffs Patkasa laughed uneasily.
1	In	in	ADP	IN	_	3	case	_	_
2	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	puffs	puff	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	obl	_	_
4	Patkasa	Patkasa	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
5	laughed	laugh	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	uneasily	uneasily	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **laugh** | past | Patkasa |  |  |  |  | in little puffs; uneasily *property* | vn nonverbal\_expression-40.2 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent in puff=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:** «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Project Gutenberg book 338 (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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