---
title: What sort of thing is the sea? what does it look like?’ — The Pink Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: What sort of thing is the sea? what does it look like?’ Who acts: sort. A sentence of «The Pink Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Pink Fairy Book, part 11, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Pink Fairy Book, The Pink Fairy Book, part 11, sentence 20

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What sort of thing is the sea? what does it look like?’

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**Who acts:** sort · **What happens:** be, look, sort · **To what, where:** sea, thing

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This is a sentence of «The Pink Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Pink Fairy Book, part 11. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (sort), 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:pg5615:11:20
# text = What sort of thing is the sea? what does it look like?’
1	What	what	DET	WDT	PronType=Int	2	det	_	_
2	sort	sort	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
3	of	of	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
4	thing	thing	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nmod	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	sea	sea	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	12	punct	_	_
9	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	12	obl	_	_
10	does	do	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
11	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
12	look	look	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	7	acl:relcl	_	_
13	like	like	ADP	IN	_	12	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | present | what sort of thing | the sea |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **look** | present · do-support | sort | the sea |  |  |  |  | vn stimulus\_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus |
| 3 | **sort** |  |  | thing |  |  |  |  | nom sort «cognition 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 Pink Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 5615 (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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