---
title: The silver pigeon sprung, and ate that up. — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: The silver pigeon sprung, and ate that up. Who acts: silver pigeon. A sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Battle of the Birds, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 255

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The silver pigeon sprung, and ate that up.

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**Who acts:** silver pigeon · **What happens:** spring, eat up · **To what, where:** silver pigeon, that

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This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Battle of the Birds. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (silver pigeon), 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:pg7885:31:255
# text = The silver pigeon sprung, and ate that up.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	silver	silver	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	compound	_	_
3	pigeon	pigeon	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
4	sprung	spring	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	3	acl	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
6	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	7	cc	_	_
7	ate	eat	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
8	that	that	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	7	obj	_	_
9	up	up	ADP	RP	_	7	compound:prt	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **spring** | participle |  | the silver pigeon *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn run-51.3.2 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **eat up** | past | the silver pigeon | that |  |  |  |  | vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent that=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:** «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7885 (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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