---
title: Were his nurses comely or harsh-looking? — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Were his nurses comely or harsh-looking? Who acts: nurses. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter II, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter II, sentence 1

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Were his nurses comely or harsh-looking?

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**Who acts:** nurses · **What happens:** look

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter II. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (nurses), 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:pg2892:15:1
# text = Were his nurses comely or harsh-looking?
1	Were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	8	aux	_	_
2	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	3	nmod:poss	_	_
3	nurses	nurse	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	nsubj	_	_
4	comely	comely	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	compound	_	_
5	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	harsh	harsh	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	looking	look	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **look** | past · progressive | his nurses |  |  |  |  |  | vn stimulus\_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus |

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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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