---
title: Never try to fly like other birds. — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: Never try to fly like other birds. Who acts: you. A sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Iktomi and the Fawn, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Old Indian Legends, Iktomi and the Fawn, sentence 38

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Never try to fly like other birds.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** not try, fly

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This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Iktomi and the Fawn. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you), 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:pg338:386`): 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:pg338:6:38
# text = Never try to fly like other birds.
1	Never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	2	advmod	_	_
2	try	try	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	to	to	PART	TO	_	4	mark	_	_
4	fly	fly	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	xcomp	_	_
5	like	like	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	other	other	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	birds	bird	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obl	_	_
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **try** | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn try-61.1 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality |
| 2 | **fly** *not said to happen* | to-infinitive | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  | like other birds | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=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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