---
title: Peeping through the wild rice, he pointed with unsteady finger towar… — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: Peeping through the wild rice, he pointed with unsteady finger toward the boy playing all unawares. Who acts: Tis, 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 98

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Peeping through the wild rice, he pointed with unsteady finger toward the boy playing all unawares.

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**Who acts:** Tis, boy · **What happens:** peep, point, play

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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 (Tis, boy), 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:pg338:1044`): 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:pg338:12:98
# text = Peeping through the wild rice, he pointed with unsteady finger toward the boy playing all unawares.
1	Peeping	peep	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	8	advcl	_	_
2	through	through	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	wild	wild	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	rice	rice	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	obl	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	1	punct	_	_
7	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
8	pointed	point	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	with	with	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
10	unsteady	unsteady	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	finger	finger	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obl	_	_
12	toward	toward	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
13	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
14	boy	boy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obl	_	_
15	playing	play	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	14	acl	_	_
16	all	all	ADV	RB	_	17	advmod	_	_
17	unawares	unawares	ADV	RB	_	15	advmod	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **peep** | gerund | Tis *not said here* |  |  |  |  | through the wild rice | vn peer-30.3 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent through rice=Theme |
| 2 | **point** | past | Tis |  |  |  |  | with unsteady finger; toward the boy | vn wink-40.3.1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **play** | gerund | the boy *not said here* |  |  |  |  | unawares *property* | vn performance-26.7-1 «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:** 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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