---
title: It was dark. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: It was dark. Who acts: giant. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Molly Whuppie, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, Molly Whuppie, sentence 23

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It was dark.

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**Who acts:** giant · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Molly Whuppie. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (giant), 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:pg7439:25:23
# text = It was dark.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	cop	_	_
3	dark	dark	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | past | giant |  |  |  |  | dark *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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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