---
title: The flowers went on beseeching him, and his heart grew ever weaker a… — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: The flowers went on beseeching him, and his heart grew ever weaker and weaker. Who acts: flowers, heart. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Fairy of the Dawn, part 1, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Fairy of the Dawn, part 1, sentence 135

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The flowers went on beseeching him, and his heart grew ever weaker and weaker.

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**Who acts:** flowers, heart · **What happens:** go on, beseech, grow · **To what, where:** horse

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Fairy of the Dawn, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (flowers, heart), 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:pg641:1680`): 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:pg641:19:135
# text = The flowers went on beseeching him, and his heart grew ever weaker and weaker.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	flowers	flower	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	nsubj	_	_
3	went	go	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	on	on	ADP	RP	_	3	compound:prt	_	_
5	beseeching	beseech	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	3	xcomp	_	_
6	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	obj	_	_
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
9	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	10	nmod:poss	_	_
10	heart	heart	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	nsubj	_	_
11	grew	grow	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	_
12	ever	ever	ADV	RB	PronType=Ind	13	advmod	_	_
13	weaker	weak	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	11	xcomp	_	_
14	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	15	cc	_	_
15	weaker	weak	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	13	conj	_	_
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **go on** | past | the flowers |  |  |  |  |  | vn begin-55.1 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality |
| 2 | **beseech** | gerund | the flowers *not said here* | horse |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **grow** | past | horse's heart |  |  |  |  | weak *property* | vn appear-48.1.1 «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 Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 641 (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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