---
title: “But how can I kill my wife’s father?” — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “But how can I kill my wife’s father?” Who acts: cleric. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter IX, 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/pg2892/80/11/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter IX, sentence 11

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“But how can I kill my wife’s father?”

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**Who acts:** cleric · **What happens:** kill · **To what, where:** father

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter IX. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (cleric), 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:pg2892:80:11
# text = “But how can I kill my wife’s father?”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
3	how	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	6	advmod	_	_
4	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
5	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
6	kill	kill	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	wife	wife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nmod:poss	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	’s	's	PART	POS	_	8	case	_	_
10	father	father	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **kill** *in a quote* | can | the cleric *= cleric* | my wife's father |  |  |  |  | vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent father=Theme |

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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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- ← previous: [sentence 10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/80/10/)
- next →: [sentence 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/80/12/)
- ↑ back to [Chapter IX](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/80/)