---
title: They crouched low upon the open ground. — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: They crouched low upon the open ground. Who acts: warriors. A sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, The Tree-bound, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Old Indian Legends, The Tree-bound, sentence 23

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They crouched low upon the open ground.

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**Who acts:** warriors · **What happens:** crouch · **To what, where:** open ground

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This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, The Tree-bound. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (warriors), 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:pg338:8:23
# text = They crouched low upon the open ground.
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	crouched	crouch	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	low	low	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	2	advmod	_	_
4	upon	upon	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
6	open	open	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	ground	ground	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **crouch** | past | warriors *= warrior* |  |  | the open ground |  | low *property* | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme upon ground=Location |

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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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