---
title: Was it the song of a bird? — The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North · tree and pragmatics
description: Was it the song of a bird? Who acts: song, bird. A sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Maid of Beauty, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Maid of Beauty, sentence 6

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Was it the song of a bird?

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**Who acts:** song, bird · **What happens:** be, sing · **To what, where:** sound

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This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Maid of Beauty. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (song, bird), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Mova's own parse.** This tree may be wrong.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg66819:3:6
# text = Was it the song of a bird?
1	Was	be	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	1	obj	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	song	song	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	nsubj	_	_
5	of	of	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	bird	bird	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **be** | past | the song of a bird | sound |  |  |  |  | vn representation-110.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Pivot it=Theme |
| 2 | **sing** |  | a bird |  |  |  |  |  | nom song «communication intransitive»: of=agent |

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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 Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 66819 (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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