---
title: The cat bit the mouse's tail off. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: The cat bit the mouse's tail off. Who acts: cat. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Cat and the Mouse, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Cat and the Mouse, sentence 2

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The cat bit the mouse's tail off.

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**Who acts:** cat · **What happens:** bite off · **To what, where:** tail

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Cat and the Mouse. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (cat), 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:pg7439:40:2
# text = The cat bit the mouse's tail off.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	cat	cat	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	bit	bite	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	mouse	mouse	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nmod:poss	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	's	's	PART	POS	_	5	case	_	_
7	tail	tail	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	_
8	off	off	ADP	RP	_	3	compound:prt	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **bite off** | past | the cat | the mouse's tail |  |  |  |  | vn swat-18.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent tail=Patient |

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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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