---
title: Shameless coward! he delights in torturing helpless creatures!” — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: Shameless coward! he delights in torturing helpless creatures!” Who acts: Shameless coward. A sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Manstin, the Rabbit, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Old Indian Legends, Manstin, the Rabbit, sentence 8

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Shameless coward! he delights in torturing helpless creatures!”

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**Who acts:** Shameless coward · **What happens:** delight, torture · **To what, where:** helpless creatures

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This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Manstin, the Rabbit. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Shameless coward), 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:pg338:14:8
# text = Shameless coward! he delights in torturing helpless creatures!”
1	Shameless	shameless	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	amod	_	_
2	coward	coward	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
4	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
5	delights	delight	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	in	in	SCONJ	IN	_	7	mark	_	_
7	torturing	torture	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	5	advcl	_	_
8	helpless	helpless	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	creatures	creature	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **delight** | present | Shameless coward |  |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer |
| 2 | **torture** | gerund | Shameless coward *not said here* | helpless creatures |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus creature=Experiencer |

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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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