---
title: “What is a feast without Fionn?” they complained. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “What is a feast without Fionn?” they complained. Who acts: feast, Fionn. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter III, 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/pg2892/35/12/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter III, sentence 12

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“What is a feast without Fionn?” they complained.

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**Who acts:** feast, Fionn · **What happens:** be, complain · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter III. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (feast, Fionn), 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:pg2892:1044`): 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:pg2892:35:12
# text = “What is a feast without Fionn?” they complained.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	11	ccomp	_	_
3	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	cop	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	feast	feast	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
6	without	without	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
7	Fionn	Fionn	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	5	nmod	_	_
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
9	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
10	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	_
11	complained	complain	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	11	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** *in a quote* | present | a feast without Fionn |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **complain** *speech: other* | past | Fionn |  |  |  |  |  | vn complain-37.8 «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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- ← previous: [sentence 11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/35/11/)
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