---
title: At last, dragging himself with difficulty, came a big rat, white wit… — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: At last, dragging himself with difficulty, came a big rat, white with age, and stopped on the bank. Who acts: big rat. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Ratcatcher, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Ratcatcher, sentence 44

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At last, dragging himself with difficulty, came a big rat, white with age, and stopped on the bank.

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**Who acts:** big rat · **What happens:** drag, come, stop · **To what, where:** plunging, last, bank

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Ratcatcher. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (big rat), 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:pg540:2456`): 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:pg540:32:44
# text = At last, dragging himself with difficulty, came a big rat, white with age, and stopped on the bank.
1	At	at	ADP	IN	_	2	case	_	_
2	last	last	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	obl	_	_
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	4	punct	_	_
4	dragging	drag	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	9	advcl	_	_
5	himself	himself	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs|Reflex=Yes	4	obj	_	_
6	with	with	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
7	difficulty	difficulty	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	4	punct	_	_
9	came	come	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
11	big	big	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	amod	_	_
12	rat	rat	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
13	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	14	punct	_	_
14	white	white	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	amod	_	_
15	with	with	ADP	IN	_	16	case	_	_
16	age	age	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	14	obl	_	_
17	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	19	punct	_	_
18	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	19	cc	_	_
19	stopped	stop	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	9	conj	_	_
20	on	on	ADP	IN	_	22	case	_	_
21	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	22	det	_	_
22	bank	bank	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	19	obl	_	_
23	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **drag** | gerund | a big rat *not said here* | plunging |  |  |  | with difficulty | vn carry-11.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent himself=Theme |
| 2 | **come** | past | a big rat |  |  | last |  |  | vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme at last=Location |
| 3 | **stop** | past | a big rat *not said here* |  |  | the bank |  |  | vn stop-55.4-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality |

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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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