---
title: Life seemed to stretch before her like a dark starless night. — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Life seemed to stretch before her like a dark starless night. Who acts: Life. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, A Tale of the Tontlawald, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, A Tale of the Tontlawald, sentence 154

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Life seemed to stretch before her like a dark starless night.

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**Who acts:** Life · **What happens:** seem, stretch

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, A Tale of the Tontlawald. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Life), 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:pg641:2:154
# text = Life seemed to stretch before her like a dark starless night.
1	Life	life	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	seemed	seem	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	to	to	PART	TO	_	4	mark	_	_
4	stretch	stretch	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	xcomp	_	_
5	before	before	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
6	her	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	obl	_	_
7	like	like	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
9	dark	dark	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
10	starless	starless	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	night	night	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **seem** | past | Life |  |  |  |  |  | vn seem-109-1-1-1 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Theme clause=Attribute |
| 2 | **stretch** | to-infinitive | Life *not said here* |  |  |  | before life; night |  | vn bend-45.2 «NP.patient V»: agent=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 Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 641 (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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