---
title: Beside her lay a black-eyed baby boy cooing and laughing. — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: Beside her lay a black-eyed baby boy cooing and laughing. Who acts: duck, eyed baby boy. A sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, The Toad and the Boy, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Old Indian Legends, The Toad and the Boy, sentence 6

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Beside her lay a black-eyed baby boy cooing and laughing.

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**Who acts:** duck, eyed baby boy · **What happens:** lie, coo, laugh · **To what, where:** eyed baby boy

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This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, The Toad and the Boy. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (duck, eyed baby boy), 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:pg338:12:6
# text = Beside her lay a black-eyed baby boy cooing and laughing.
1	Beside	beside	ADP	IN	_	3	mark	_	_
2	her	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	lay	lie	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
5	black	black	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	eyed	eyed	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
8	baby	baby	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	compound	_	_
9	boy	boy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	_
10	cooing	coo	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	9	acl	_	_
11	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
12	laughing	laugh	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	10	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **lie** | past | duck | a eyed baby boy |  |  |  |  | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location boy=Theme |
| 2 | **coo** | gerund | a eyed baby boy *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn animal\_sounds-38 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **laugh** | gerund | a eyed baby boy *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn nonverbal\_expression-40.2 «NP V»: agent=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:** «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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