---
title: "'Bad news is soon tole,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. — Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings · tree and pragmatics
description: "'Bad news is soon tole,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. Who acts: Bad news, tole. A sentence of «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, XI. Mr. Wolf Makes a Failure, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, XI. Mr. Wolf Makes a Failure, sentence 32

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"'Bad news is soon tole,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.

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**Who acts:** Bad news, tole · **What happens:** be, say · **To what, where:** tole, Brer · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, XI. Mr. Wolf Makes a Failure. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Bad news, tole), 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:pg2306:14:32
# text = "'Bad news is soon tole,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	10	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	'	'	PUNCT	``	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	Bad	bad	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	news	news	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
6	soon	soon	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	7	advmod	_	_
7	tole	tole	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	'	'	PUNCT	''	_	7	punct	_	_
10	sez	say	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
11	Brer	Brer	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	10	obj	_	_
12	Rabbit	Rabbit	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	11	flat	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	14	punct	_	_
14	sezee	sezee	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	appos	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** *in a quote* | present | Bad news | tole |  |  |  | soon *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **say** *speech: assert* *in a quote* | present | tole | Brer |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent brer=Topic |

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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:** «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, Project Gutenberg book 2306 (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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