---
title: In the meantime their little sister at home was growing up quickly. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: In the meantime their little sister at home was growing up quickly. Who acts: little sister. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Twelve Brothers, 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/pg540/41/27/)

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Twelve Brothers, sentence 27

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In the meantime their little sister at home was growing up quickly.

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**Who acts:** little sister · **What happens:** grow up · **To what, where:** meantime

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Twelve Brothers. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (little sister), 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:pg540:41:27
# text = In the meantime their little sister at home was growing up quickly.
1	In	in	ADP	IN	_	3	case	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	meantime	meantime	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obl	_	_
4	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
5	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	sister	sister	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
7	at	at	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	home	home	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	_
9	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	10	aux	_	_
10	growing	grow	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
11	up	up	ADP	RP	_	10	compound:prt	_	_
12	quickly	quickly	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **grow up** | past · progressive | hands's little sister at home |  |  | the meantime |  | quickly *property* | vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme in meantime=Location |

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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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