---
title: Fionn inquired as calmly, and as though addressing the air. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Fionn inquired as calmly, and as though addressing the air. Who acts: Fionn. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter II, 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/pg2892/46/75/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter II, sentence 75

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Fionn inquired as calmly, and as though addressing the air.

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**Who acts:** Fionn · **What happens:** inquire, address · **To what, where:** air

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter II. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Fionn), 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:pg2892:46:75
# text = Fionn inquired as calmly, and as though addressing the air.
1	Fionn	Fionn	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	inquired	inquire	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	as	as	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
4	calmly	calmly	ADV	RB	_	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
6	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
7	as	as	ADV	RB	ExtPos=ADV	9	advmod	_	_
8	though	though	SCONJ	IN	_	7	fixed	_	_
9	addressing	address	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	2	advcl	_	_
10	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	air	air	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **inquire** *speech: other* | past | Fionn |  |  |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **address** | gerund | Fionn *not said here* | the air |  |  |  |  | vn illustrate-25.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent air=Destination |

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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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