---
title: There was little pleasure in flying about like this. — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: There was little pleasure in flying about like this. Who acts: little pleasure. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Nightingale, 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/pg640/48/97/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Nightingale, sentence 97

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There was little pleasure in flying about like this.

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**Who acts:** little pleasure · **What happens:** be, fly

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Nightingale. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (little pleasure), 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:pg640:48:97
# text = There was little pleasure in flying about like this.
1	There	there	PRON	EX	PronType=Dem	2	expl	_	_
2	was	be	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	pleasure	pleasure	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
5	in	in	SCONJ	IN	_	6	mark	_	_
6	flying	fly	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	4	acl	_	_
7	about	about	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
8	like	like	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
9	this	this	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	6	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **be** | past | little pleasure |  |  | there |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **fly** | gerund | little pleasure *not said here* |  |  |  |  | like this; about *property* | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=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 Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 640 (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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