---
title: ‘It looks like the trunk of a great thick birch tree.’ — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘It looks like the trunk of a great thick birch tree.’ Who acts: darkness. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Seven Foals, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Seven Foals, sentence 76

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‘It looks like the trunk of a great thick birch tree.’

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**Who acts:** darkness · **What happens:** look

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Seven Foals. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (darkness), 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:pg540:49:76
# text = ‘It looks like the trunk of a great thick birch tree.’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	looks	look	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	like	like	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	trunk	trunk	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	_
7	of	of	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
9	great	great	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	amod	_	_
10	thick	thick	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	amod	_	_
11	birch	birch	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	compound	_	_
12	tree	tree	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **look** | present | darkness |  |  |  |  | like the trunk of a great thick birch tree | vn stimulus\_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus |

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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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