---
title: A MAN in buckskins sat upon the top of a little hillock. — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: A MAN in buckskins sat upon the top of a little hillock. Who acts: MAN. A sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Shooting of the Red Eagle, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Old Indian Legends, Shooting of the Red Eagle, sentence 1

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A MAN in buckskins sat upon the top of a little hillock.

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**Who acts:** MAN · **What happens:** sit · **To what, where:** top

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This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Shooting of the Red Eagle. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (MAN), 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:pg338:9:1
# text = A MAN in buckskins sat upon the top of a little hillock.
1	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	MAN	man	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
3	in	in	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
4	buckskins	buckskin	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nmod	_	_
5	sat	sit	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	upon	upon	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	top	top	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	_
9	of	of	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
11	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	amod	_	_
12	hillock	hillock	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **sit** | past | a MAN in buckskins |  |  | the top of a little hillock |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent upon top=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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