---
title: He may have smiled at them, and coaxed, and hung back. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: He may have smiled at them, and coaxed, and hung back. Who acts: boy. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter IV, 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/pg2892/17/21/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter IV, sentence 21

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He may have smiled at them, and coaxed, and hung back.

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**Who acts:** boy · **What happens:** smile, coax, hang back

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter IV. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (boy), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg2892:362`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg2892:17:21
# text = He may have smiled at them, and coaxed, and hung back.
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	smiled	smile	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
5	at	at	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
6	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	obl	_	_
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
9	coaxed	coax	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	4	conj	_	_
10	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
11	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
12	hung	hang	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	4	conj	_	_
13	back	back	ADV	RB	_	12	advmod	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **smile** | may · perfect | boy |  |  |  |  | at women *= woman* | vn manner\_speaking-37.3 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **coax** | participle | boy *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn lure-59.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **hang back** | participle | boy *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «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:** «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Project Gutenberg book 2892 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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