---
title: Why should I not be happy? — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: Why should I not be happy? Who acts: I. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Miller of the Dee., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Miller of the Dee., sentence 17

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Why should I not be happy?

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** not be

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Miller of the Dee.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), 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:pg18442:16:17
# text = Why should I not be happy?
1	Why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	6	advmod	_	_
2	should	should	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
3	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
4	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
5	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	cop	_	_
6	happy	happy	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **is** | should | I |  |  |  |  | happy *property* | tree rules |

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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:** «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 18442 (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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