---
title: The wild beasts would soon come and tear them to pieces.” — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: The wild beasts would soon come and tear them to pieces.” Who acts: wild beasts. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Hansel and Grettel, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Blue Fairy Book, Hansel and Grettel, sentence 7

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The wild beasts would soon come and tear them to pieces.”

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**Who acts:** wild beasts · **What happens:** come, tear · **To what, where:** beasts

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Hansel and Grettel. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (wild beasts), 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:pg503:35:7
# text = The wild beasts would soon come and tear them to pieces.”
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	wild	wild	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	beasts	beast	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
4	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
5	soon	soon	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	6	advmod	_	_
6	come	come	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	tear	tear	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	conj	_	_
9	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	obj	_	_
10	to	to	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	pieces	piece	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **come** | would | the wild beasts |  |  |  |  | soon *property* | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **tear** | infinitive | the wild beasts *not said here* | beasts *= beast* |  |  |  | to pieces *result* | vn break-45.1 «NP V NP PP.result»: agent=Agent they=Patient to piece=Result |

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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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