---
title: This time they could not prevent him overhearing. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: This time they could not prevent him overhearing. Who acts: women. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter V, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter V, sentence 23

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This time they could not prevent him overhearing.

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**Who acts:** women · **What happens:** not prevent, overhear · **To what, where:** Fionn

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter V. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (women), 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:pg2892:18:23
# text = This time they could not prevent him overhearing.
1	This	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	2	det	_	_
2	time	time	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obl:unmarked	_	_
3	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
4	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
5	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
6	prevent	prevent	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	obj	_	_
8	overhearing	overhear	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	6	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **prevent** | could | women *= woman* | Fionn |  |  | time |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **overhear** | gerund | women *= woman* *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn sight-30.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer |

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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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