---
title: While he lay there dreadful dreams haunted him. — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: While he lay there dreadful dreams haunted him. Who acts: noise, dreadful dreams. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Young Man Who Would Have His Eyes Opened, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Young Man Who Would Have His Eyes Opened, sentence 30

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While he lay there dreadful dreams haunted him.

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**Who acts:** noise, dreadful dreams · **What happens:** lie, haunt · **To what, where:** noise

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Young Man Who Would Have His Eyes Opened. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (noise, dreadful dreams), 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:pg641:34:30
# text = While he lay there dreadful dreams haunted him.
1	While	while	SCONJ	IN	_	3	mark	_	_
2	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	lay	lie	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	there	there	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	3	advmod	_	_
5	dreadful	dreadful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	dreams	dream	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nsubj	_	_
7	haunted	haunt	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	advcl	_	_
8	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **lie** | past | noise |  |  | there |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **haunt** | past | dreadful dreams | noise |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus he=Experiencer |

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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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