---
title: "Ah, better still!" cried the wife. " — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: "Ah, better still!" cried the wife. " Who acts: wife. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, What the Old Man Does Is Always Right, 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/pg27200/132/104/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, What the Old Man Does Is Always Right, sentence 104

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"Ah, better still!" cried the wife. "

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**Who acts:** wife · **What happens:** cry

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, What the Old Man Does Is Always Right. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (wife), 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:pg27200:132:104
# text = "Ah, better still!" cried the wife. "
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	8	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Ah	ah	INTJ	UH	_	4	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
4	better	well	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	8	advmod	_	_
5	still	still	ADV	RB	_	4	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
8	cried	cry	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	wife	wife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
12	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	8	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **cry** *speech: express* | past | the wife |  |  |  |  | well *property* | 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:** «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Project Gutenberg book 27200 (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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