---
title: “Nibble, nibble, little mouse, Who’s nibbling my house?” — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: “Nibble, nibble, little mouse, Who’s nibbling my house?” Who acts: Nibble. 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 76

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“Nibble, nibble, little mouse, Who’s nibbling my house?”

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**Who acts:** Nibble · **What happens:** nibble · **To what, where:** house

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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 (Nibble), 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:pg503:35:76
# text = “Nibble, nibble, little mouse, Who’s nibbling my house?”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Nibble	nibble	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	4	punct	_	_
4	nibble	nibble	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
6	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	mouse	mouse	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
9	Who	who	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	11	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	’s	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	11	aux	_	_
11	nibbling	nibble	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	2	conj	_	_
12	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	13	nmod:poss	_	_
13	house	house	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	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 | **nibble** *in a quote* | present · progressive | Nibble and nibble and little mouse | my house |  |  |  |  | vn chew-39.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent house=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 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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