---
title: The bird perched on a tree and sang: — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: The bird perched on a tree and sang: Who acts: bird. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Rose-tree, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Rose-tree, sentence 43

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The bird perched on a tree and sang:

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**Who acts:** bird · **What happens:** perch, sing · **To what, where:** bird, tree

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Rose-tree. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (bird), 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:pg7439:8:43
# text = The bird perched on a tree and sang:
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	bird	bird	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nsubj	_	_
3	perched	perch	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	2	acl	_	_
4	on	on	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	tree	tree	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	3	cc	_	_
8	sang	sing	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **perch** | participle |  | the bird *not said here* |  | a tree |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent on tree=Location |
| 2 | **sing** *speech: express* | past | the bird |  |  |  |  |  | vn sound\_emission-43.2 «NP.location V PP.theme»: agent=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:** «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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