---
title: _Avoid vain wrangling. — The grateful elephant · tree and pragmatics
description: _Avoid vain wrangling. Who acts: you. A sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 9, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The grateful elephant, Opening, part 9, sentence 87

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\_Avoid vain wrangling.

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** avoid · **To what, where:** vain wrangling

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This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 9. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you), 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:pg74064:9:93
# text = _Avoid vain wrangling.
1	_	_	PUNCT	NFP	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Avoid	avoid	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	vain	vain	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	wrangling	wrangling	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **avoid** | imperative | you *not said here* | vain wrangling |  |  |  |  | vn avoid-52 «NP V NP.location»: agent=Agent wrangling=Location |

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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 grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Project Gutenberg book 74064 (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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