---
title: And a thousand merry people learned it after him. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: And a thousand merry people learned it after him. Who acts: merry people. 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 39

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And a thousand merry people learned it after him.

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**Who acts:** merry people · **What happens:** learn · **To what, where:** thousand

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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 (merry people), 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:pg2892:32:39
# text = And a thousand merry people learned it after him.
1	And	and	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	thousand	thousand	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	6	obl	_	_
4	merry	merry	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
6	learned	learn	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	obj	_	_
8	after	after	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
9	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **learn** | past | merry people | a thousand |  |  | after Lugaidh |  | vn learn-14-2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Topic |

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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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