---
title: And then they all started a-crying worse than before. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: And then they all started a-crying worse than before. Who acts: farmer. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Three Sillies, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Three Sillies, sentence 22

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And then they all started a-crying worse than before.

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**Who acts:** farmer · **What happens:** start, cry

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Three Sillies. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (farmer), 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:pg7439:7:22
# text = And then they all started a-crying worse than before.
1	And	and	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
2	then	then	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	5	advmod	_	_
3	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
4	all	all	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
5	started	start	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	crying	cry	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	5	advcl	_	_
9	worse	bad	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	8	xcomp	_	_
10	than	than	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	before	before	ADV	RB	_	9	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **start** | past | farmer |  |  |  | then | all *property* | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality |
| 2 | **cry** *speech: express* | gerund | farmer *not said here* |  |  |  |  | bad *property* | vn manner\_speaking-37.3 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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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