---
title: "What fools!" he cried. " — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: "What fools!" he cried. " Who acts: pride. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Rat and the Elephant, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Rat and the Elephant, sentence 10

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"What fools!" he cried. "

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**Who acts:** pride · **What happens:** fool, cry · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Rat and the Elephant. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (pride), 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:pg19994:31:10
# text = "What fools!" he cried. "
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	3	nsubj	_	_
3	fools	fool	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
6	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
7	cried	cry	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	parataxis	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
9	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **fool** *in a quote* | present |  |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **cry** *speech: express* | past | pride |  |  |  |  |  | vn manner\_speaking-37.3 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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:** «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, Project Gutenberg book 19994 (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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