Andersen's Fairy Tales, The Snow Queen, part 1, sentence 13

The higher they flew with the mirror, the more terribly it grinned: they could hardly hold it fast.

Who acts: sprite, joke · What happens: fly, grin, hold · To what, where: joke

This is a sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Snow Queen, 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 (sprite, joke), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	2 higher	det
2	higher	high	ADJ	Degree=Cmp	4 flew	advmod
3	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	4 flew	nsubj
4	flew	fly	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
5	with	with	ADP	_	7 mirror	case
6	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	7 mirror	det
7	mirror	mirror	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 flew	obl
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 grinned	punct
9	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	10 more	det
10	more	more	ADV	Degree=Cmp	11 terribly	advmod
11	terribly	terribly	ADV	_	13 grinned	advmod
12	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	13 grinned	nsubj
13	grinned	grin	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 flew	conj
14	:	:	PUNCT	_	18 hold	punct
15	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	18 hold	nsubj
16	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	18 hold	aux
17	hardly	hardly	ADV	_	18 hold	advmod
18	hold	hold	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	13 grinned	ccomp
19	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	18 hold	obj
20	fast	fast	ADV	Degree=Pos	18 hold	advmod
21	.	.	PUNCT	_	4 flew	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	fly	past	sprite		with the mirror	vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	grin	past	joke		terribly property	tree rules
3	hold	could	sprite	joke	fast, hardly property	vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Theme

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.

Text: «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, Project Gutenberg book 1597 (public domain in the USA). Tree: Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/11/13/