---
title: He almost choked with his soup. — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: He almost choked with his soup. Who acts: Iktomi. A sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Iktomi and the Muskrat, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Old Indian Legends, Iktomi and the Muskrat, sentence 11

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He almost choked with his soup.

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**Who acts:** Iktomi · **What happens:** choke

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This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Iktomi and the Muskrat. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Iktomi), 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:pg338:227`): 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:pg338:4:11
# text = He almost choked with his soup.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	almost	almost	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
3	choked	choke	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	with	with	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
5	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
6	soup	soup	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	_
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **choke** | past | Iktomi |  |  |  |  | with Iktomi's soup; almost *property* | vn fill-9.8 «NP V NP PP.theme»: agent=Agent with soup=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:** 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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