---
title: Suddenly three mice arrived from a very distant country. — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Suddenly three mice arrived from a very distant country. Who acts: three mice. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Bronze Ring, 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/pg503/2/186/)

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# The Blue Fairy Book, The Bronze Ring, sentence 186

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Suddenly three mice arrived from a very distant country.

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**Who acts:** three mice · **What happens:** arrive · **To what, where:** distant country

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Bronze Ring. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (three mice), 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:pg503:2:186
# text = Suddenly three mice arrived from a very distant country.
1	Suddenly	suddenly	ADV	RB	_	4	advmod	_	_
2	three	three	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	3	nummod	_	_
3	mice	mouse	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
4	arrived	arrive	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	from	from	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
7	very	very	ADV	RB	_	8	advmod	_	_
8	distant	distant	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	country	country	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **arrive** | past | three mice |  |  | a distant country |  | suddenly *property* | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V PP.initial\_location»: agent=Theme from country=Initial\_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:** «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 503 (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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