---
title: Bats fluttered thick as a hailstorm through the air. — Legends and tales of the Harz Mountains · tree and pragmatics
description: Bats fluttered thick as a hailstorm through the air. Who acts: Bats. A sentence of «Legends and tales of the Harz Mountains» by Toofie Lauder, A Historical Tale., part 4, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Legends and tales of the Harz Mountains, A Historical Tale., part 4, sentence 4

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Bats fluttered thick as a hailstorm through the air.

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**Who acts:** Bats · **What happens:** flutter · **To what, where:** air

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This is a sentence of «Legends and tales of the Harz Mountains» by Toofie Lauder, A Historical Tale., part 4. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Bats), 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:pg74323:21:4
# text = Bats fluttered thick as a hailstorm through the air.
1	Bats	bat	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	fluttered	flutter	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	thick	thick	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	xcomp	_	_
4	as	as	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	hailstorm	hailstorm	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	_
7	through	through	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	air	air	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **flutter** | past | Bats |  |  | the air |  | as a hailstorm; thick *property* | vn modes\_of\_being\_with\_motion-47.3 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme through air=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:** «Legends and tales of the Harz Mountains» by Toofie Lauder, Project Gutenberg book 74323 (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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