---
title: The feast was excellent, but Désiré hardly touched anything. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: The feast was excellent, but Désiré hardly touched anything. Who acts: feast, Désiré. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Canary, 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/pg540/40/246/)

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Enchanted Canary, sentence 246

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The feast was excellent, but Désiré hardly touched anything.

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**Who acts:** feast, Désiré · **What happens:** be, touch · **To what, where:** anything

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Canary. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (feast, Désiré), 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:pg540:40:246
# text = The feast was excellent, but Désiré hardly touched anything.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	feast	feast	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
3	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	cop	_	_
4	excellent	excellent	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
6	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
7	Désiré	Désiré	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
8	hardly	hardly	ADV	RB	_	9	advmod	_	_
9	touched	touch	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	parataxis	_	_
10	anything	anything	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	9	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | past | the feast |  |  |  |  | excellent *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **touch** | past | Désiré | anything |  |  |  | hardly *property* | vn contiguous\_location-47.8-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Theme anything=Co-Theme |

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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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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