---
title: Ulysses tried to catch the bird. — Tanglewood Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Ulysses tried to catch the bird. Who acts: Ulysses. A sentence of «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Circe's Palace., part 1, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Tanglewood Tales, Circe's Palace., part 1, sentence 25

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Ulysses tried to catch the bird.

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**Who acts:** Ulysses · **What happens:** try, catch · **To what, where:** bird

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This is a sentence of «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Circe's Palace., part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Ulysses), 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:pg976:15:25
# text = Ulysses tried to catch the bird.
1	Ulysses	Ulysses	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	tried	try	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	to	to	PART	TO	_	4	mark	_	_
4	catch	catch	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	xcomp	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	bird	bird	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **try** | past | Ulysses |  |  |  |  |  | vn try-61.1 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality |
| 2 | **catch** *not said to happen* | to-infinitive | Ulysses *not said here* | the bird |  |  |  |  | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent bird=Theme |

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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:** «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Project Gutenberg book 976 (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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