---
title: He may have mourned for the spider in bad luck who caught that fly. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: He may have mourned for the spider in bad luck who caught that fly. Who acts: blackbird, bad luck. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter I, 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/pg2892/14/36/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter I, sentence 36

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He may have mourned for the spider in bad luck who caught that fly.

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**Who acts:** blackbird, bad luck · **What happens:** mourn, catch · **To what, where:** bad luck, fly

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter I. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (blackbird, bad luck), 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:pg2892:14:36
# text = He may have mourned for the spider in bad luck who caught that fly.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
2	may	may	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	have	have	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	aux	_	_
4	mourned	mourn	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
5	for	for	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	spider	spider	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	_
8	in	in	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
9	bad	bad	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	luck	luck	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	_
11	who	who	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	12	nsubj	_	_
12	caught	catch	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	10	acl:relcl	_	_
13	that	that	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	14	det	_	_
14	fly	fly	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mourn** | may · perfect | blackbird |  |  | bad luck |  | for the spider | vn admire-31.2 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Experiencer for spider=Attribute |
| 2 | **catch** | past | bad luck | that fly |  |  |  |  | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent fly=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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