---
title: At length the horse slackened its pace. — The Lilac Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: At length the horse slackened its pace. Who acts: horse. A sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 9, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Lilac Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 9, sentence 30

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At length the horse slackened its pace.

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**Who acts:** horse · **What happens:** slacken · **To what, where:** pace, length

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This is a sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 9. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (horse), 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:pg3454:9:30
# text = At length the horse slackened its pace.
1	At	at	ADP	IN	_	2	case	_	_
2	length	length	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	horse	horse	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
5	slackened	slacken	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	its	its	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	7	nmod:poss	_	_
7	pace	pace	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **slacken** | past | the horse | length's pace |  | length |  |  | vn bend-45.2 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Agent pace=Patient |

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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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