---
title: "At least, I may smell it," thought Proserpina. — Tanglewood Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: "At least, I may smell it," thought Proserpina. Who acts: Proserpina. A sentence of «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Pomegranate Seeds., part 5, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg976/24/7/)

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# Tanglewood Tales, The Pomegranate Seeds., part 5, sentence 7

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"At least, I may smell it," thought Proserpina.

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**Who acts:** Proserpina · **What happens:** smell, think · **To what, where:** fruit, least · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Tanglewood Tales» by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Pomegranate Seeds., part 5. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Proserpina), 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:pg976:24:7
# text = "At least, I may smell it," thought Proserpina.
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	At	at	ADP	IN	_	3	case	_	_
3	least	least	ADJ	JJS	Degree=Sup	7	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	3	punct	_	_
5	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
6	may	may	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
7	smell	smell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	11	parataxis	_	_
8	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	11	punct	_	_
11	thought	think	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
12	Proserpina	Proserpina	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	11	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	11	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **smell** *in a quote* | may | Proserpina | fruit |  | least |  |  | vn stalk-35.3 «NP V NP PP.location»: agent=Agent it=Theme at least=Location |
| 2 | **think** *speech: other* | past | Proserpina |  |  |  |  |  | vn consider-29.9-2 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=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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