---
title: The swans fluttered round her, and hovered low so that she could thr… — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: The swans fluttered round her, and hovered low so that she could throw the shirts over them. Who acts: swans, sleeve. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Six Swans, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Six Swans, sentence 81

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The swans fluttered round her, and hovered low so that she could throw the shirts over them.

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**Who acts:** swans, sleeve · **What happens:** flutter, hover, throw · **To what, where:** shirts

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Six Swans. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (swans, sleeve), 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:pg640:161`): 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:pg640:4:81
# text = The swans fluttered round her, and hovered low so that she could throw the shirts over them.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	swans	swan	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	nsubj	_	_
3	fluttered	flutter	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	round	round	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
5	her	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	obl	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	hovered	hover	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	_
9	low	low	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	8	advmod	_	_
10	so	so	SCONJ	IN	ExtPos=SCONJ	14	mark	_	_
11	that	that	SCONJ	IN	_	10	fixed	_	_
12	she	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	14	nsubj	_	_
13	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	14	aux	_	_
14	throw	throw	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	8	advcl	_	_
15	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
16	shirts	shirt	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	obj	_	_
17	over	over	ADP	IN	_	18	case	_	_
18	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	14	obl	_	_
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **flutter** | past | the swans |  |  |  |  | round sleeve | vn modes\_of\_being\_with\_motion-47.3 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **hover** | past | the swans *not said here* |  |  |  |  | low *property* | vn modes\_of\_being\_with\_motion-47.3 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 3 | **throw** | could | sleeve | the shirts |  |  |  | over swans *= swan* | vn throw-17.1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.destinations»: agent=Agent shirt=Theme over they=Destination |

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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 Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 640 (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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