---
title: It was not exactly dark, but a kind of twilight or gloaming. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: It was not exactly dark, but a kind of twilight or gloaming. Who acts: woe. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Childe Rowland, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, Childe Rowland, sentence 43

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It was not exactly dark, but a kind of twilight or gloaming.

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**Who acts:** woe · **What happens:** not be

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Childe Rowland. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (woe), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg7439:1107`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg7439:24:43
# text = It was not exactly dark, but a kind of twilight or gloaming.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	5	advmod	_	_
4	exactly	exactly	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
5	dark	dark	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
7	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	kind	kind	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	conj	_	_
10	of	of	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	twilight	twilight	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nmod	_	_
12	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	13	cc	_	_
13	gloaming	gloaming	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	conj	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **is** | past | woe |  |  |  |  | dark, exactly *property* | tree rules |

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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:** «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7439 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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- ← previous: [sentence 42](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7439/24/42/)
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- ↑ back to [Childe Rowland](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7439/24/)