---
title: Say, which shall it be?” — The Crimson Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Say, which shall it be?” Who acts: you. A sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 18, 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/pg2435/18/46/)

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# The Crimson Fairy Book, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 18, sentence 46

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Say, which shall it be?”

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** say, be · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 18. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you), 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:pg2435:18:46
# text = Say, which shall it be?”
1	Say	say	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
3	which	which	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	6	nsubj	_	_
4	shall	shall	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
5	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
6	be	be	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	1	ccomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: assert* | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V how S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **be** | shall |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

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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 Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 2435 (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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