---
title: What was the matter?" — Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings · tree and pragmatics
description: What was the matter?" Who acts: matter. A sentence of «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, X. a Case of Measles, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, X. a Case of Measles, sentence 11

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What was the matter?"

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**Who acts:** matter · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings» by Joel Chandler Harris, X. a Case of Measles. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (matter), 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:pg2306:56:11
# text = What was the matter?"
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	0	root	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	1	cop	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	matter	matter	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | past | the matter |  |  |  |  |  | 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:** «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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