---
title: The Lioness laughed at them, and said: “Why! — Three hundred Aesop’s fables · tree and pragmatics
description: The Lioness laughed at them, and said: “Why! Who acts: Lioness. A sentence of «Three hundred Aesop’s fables» by Aesop, Aesop’s Fables, part 1, 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/pg21/3/131/)

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# Three hundred Aesop’s fables, Aesop’s Fables, part 1, sentence 131

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The Lioness laughed at them, and said: “Why!

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**Who acts:** Lioness · **What happens:** laugh, say · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Three hundred Aesop’s fables» by Aesop, Aesop’s Fables, 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 (Lioness), 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:pg21:3:131
# text = The Lioness laughed at them, and said: “Why!
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	Lioness	Lioness	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	laughed	laugh	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	at	at	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
5	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	10	punct	_	_
10	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	11	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	Why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	8	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **laugh** | past | the Lioness |  |  |  |  | at animals *= animal* | vn nonverbal\_expression-40.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | the Lioness *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: 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:** «Three hundred Aesop’s fables» by Aesop, Project Gutenberg book 21 (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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