---
title: Prince sat on his hind legs with delight and mewed like a pussy cat. — The Lilac Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Prince sat on his hind legs with delight and mewed like a pussy cat. Who acts: Prince. A sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 23, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg3454/23/76/)

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# The Lilac Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 23, sentence 76

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Prince sat on his hind legs with delight and mewed like a pussy cat.

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**Who acts:** Prince · **What happens:** sit, mew · **To what, where:** hind legs

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This is a sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 23. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Prince), 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:pg3454:23:76
# text = Prince sat on his hind legs with delight and mewed like a pussy cat.
1	Prince	Prince	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	sat	sit	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	on	on	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
4	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
5	hind	hind	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	legs	leg	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obl	_	_
7	with	with	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	delight	delight	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	mewed	mew	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	2	conj	_	_
11	like	like	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
12	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
13	pussy	pussy	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	14	amod	_	_
14	cat	cat	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **sit** | past | Prince |  |  | Prince's hind legs |  | with delight | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent on leg=Location |
| 2 | **mew** | participle | Prince *not said here* |  |  |  |  | like a pussy cat | vn animal\_sounds-38 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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:** «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3454 (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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