---
title: What tales that man could tell a boy, and what questions a boy could… — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: What tales that man could tell a boy, and what questions a boy could ask him. Who acts: tales, questions. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter VII, 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/pg2892/20/9/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter VII, sentence 9

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What tales that man could tell a boy, and what questions a boy could ask him.

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**Who acts:** tales, questions · **What happens:** tale, tell, ask · **To what, where:** man, boy · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter VII. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (tales, questions), 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:pg2892:20:9
# text = What tales that man could tell a boy, and what questions a boy could ask him.
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	2	nsubj	_	_
2	tales	tale	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
3	that	that	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	4	det	_	_
4	man	man	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nmod:unmarked	_	_
5	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
6	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	boy	boy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	16	punct	_	_
10	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	16	cc	_	_
11	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	16	obj	_	_
12	questions	question	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	16	nsubj	_	_
13	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
14	boy	boy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	appos	_	_
15	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	16	aux	_	_
16	ask	ask	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	conj	_	_
17	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	16	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tale** |  |  | that man |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | could | tales |  | a boy |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent boy=Recipient |
| 3 | **ask** *speech: ask* | could | questions |  | man |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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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