---
title: Across them she placed the other bones, piece by piece, like the ste… — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Across them she placed the other bones, piece by piece, like the steps of a ladder. Who acts: door. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Pig, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Enchanted Pig, sentence 173

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Across them she placed the other bones, piece by piece, like the steps of a ladder.

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**Who acts:** door · **What happens:** place, step · **To what, where:** other bones, ladder

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Pig. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (door), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg540:1326`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg540:12:173
# text = Across them she placed the other bones, piece by piece, like the steps of a ladder.
1	Across	across	ADP	IN	_	2	case	_	_
2	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	obl	_	_
3	she	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
4	placed	place	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
6	other	other	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	bones	bone	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
9	piece	piece	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl:unmarked	_	_
10	by	by	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	piece	piece	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nmod	_	_
12	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	15	punct	_	_
13	like	like	ADP	IN	_	15	case	_	_
14	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	15	det	_	_
15	steps	step	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obl	_	_
16	of	of	ADP	IN	_	18	case	_	_
17	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	18	det	_	_
18	ladder	ladder	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	15	nmod	_	_
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **place** | past | door | the other bones |  |  |  | across bones *= bone*; like the steps of a ladder; piece by piece *obl:unmarked* | vn put-9.1-2 «NP V PP.destination NP»: agent=Agent bone=Theme |
| 2 | **step** |  |  | a ladder |  |  |  |  | nom step «act transitive»: of=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 Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 540 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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