---
title: That choice lay before Fionn, who never knew shame. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: That choice lay before Fionn, who never knew shame. Who acts: choice, 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/pg2892/46/8/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter II, sentence 8

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That choice lay before Fionn, who never knew shame.

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**Who acts:** choice, Fionn · **What happens:** lie, not know · **To what, where:** Fionn, shame

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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 (choice, 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:pg2892:1403`): 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:pg2892:46:8
# text = That choice lay before Fionn, who never knew shame.
1	That	that	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	2	det	_	_
2	choice	choice	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	lay	lie	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	before	before	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
5	Fionn	Fionn	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
7	who	who	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	9	nsubj	_	_
8	never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	9	advmod	_	_
9	knew	know	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	acl:relcl	_	_
10	shame	shame	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obj	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **lie** | past | that choice |  |  | Fionn |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent before fionn=Location |
| 2 | **not** **know** | past | Fionn | shame |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Experiencer shame=Stimulus |

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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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