---
title: What an idle and childish taste that is! — Tanglewood Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: What an idle and childish taste that is! Who acts: idle taste. A sentence of «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Pomegranate Seeds., part 4, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Tanglewood Tales, The Pomegranate Seeds., part 4, sentence 74

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What an idle and childish taste that is!

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**Who acts:** idle taste · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Pomegranate Seeds., part 4. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (idle taste), 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:pg976:23:74
# text = What an idle and childish taste that is!
1	What	what	DET	WDT	PronType=Int	6	det	_	_
2	an	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
3	idle	idle	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
4	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
5	childish	childish	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	conj	_	_
6	taste	taste	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
7	that	that	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	8	nsubj	_	_
8	is	be	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	acl:relcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **be** | present | what idle taste |  |  |  |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=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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