---
title: They lay in wait at the waterfalls up which I leaped like a silver f… — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: They lay in wait at the waterfalls up which I leaped like a silver flash. Who acts: men. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter X, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter X, sentence 7

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They lay in wait at the waterfalls up which I leaped like a silver flash.

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**Who acts:** men · **What happens:** lay up, leap · **To what, where:** wait

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter X. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (men), 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:pg2892:11:7
# text = They lay in wait at the waterfalls up which I leaped like a silver flash.
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	lay	lay	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	in	in	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
4	wait	wait	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	_
5	at	at	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	waterfalls	waterfall	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obl	_	_
8	up	up	ADP	RP	_	2	compound:prt	_	_
9	which	which	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	11	nsubj	_	_
10	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	_
11	leaped	leap	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
12	like	like	ADP	IN	_	15	case	_	_
13	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	15	det	_	_
14	silver	silver	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	15	amod	_	_
15	flash	flash	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **lay up** | present | men *= man* |  |  | wait |  | at the waterfalls | vn put\_spatial-9.2 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent in wait=Destination |
| 2 | **leap** | past |  |  |  |  |  | like a silver flash | vn run-51.3.2-1 «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:** «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Project Gutenberg book 2892 (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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