---
title: “But why did you choose this river out of all the rivers?” — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “But why did you choose this river out of all the rivers?” Who acts: you. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter IX, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter IX, sentence 20

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“But why did you choose this river out of all the rivers?”

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** choose · **To what, where:** river, rivers

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter IX. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you), 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:pg2892:22:20
# text = “But why did you choose this river out of all the rivers?”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
3	why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	6	advmod	_	_
4	did	do	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=2|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
5	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
6	choose	choose	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	this	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	8	det	_	_
8	river	river	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	_
9	out	out	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
10	of	of	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
11	all	all	DET	PDT	PronType=Tot	13	det:predet	_	_
12	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	rivers	river	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **choose** *in a quote* | past · do-support | you | this river |  | all rivers |  |  | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent river=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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- ← previous: [sentence 19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/22/19/)
- next →: [sentence 21](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/22/21/)
- ↑ back to [Chapter IX](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/22/)