---
title: “I think the game is mine,” she insisted softly. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “I think the game is mine,” she insisted softly. Who acts: I, game. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter VIII, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter VIII, sentence 42

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“I think the game is mine,” she insisted softly.

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**Who acts:** I, game · **What happens:** think, be, insist · **To what, where:** mine · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter VIII. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I, game), 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:pg2892:2076`): 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:pg2892:69:42
# text = “I think the game is mine,” she insisted softly.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	_
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	think	think	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	11	ccomp	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	game	game	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
6	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
7	mine	my	PRON	PRP	Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	3	ccomp	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	3	punct	_	_
9	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
10	she	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	_
11	insisted	insist	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
12	softly	softly	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	11	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **think** *speech: other* *in a quote* | present | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn focus-87.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **is a** *in a quote* | present | the game | mine |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **insist** *speech: other* | past | game |  |  |  |  | softly *property* | vn say-37.7-1 «NP V S-Quote»: agent=Agent clause=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:** 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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