---
title: But in the water joy lay deeper, life pulsed deeper. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: But in the water joy lay deeper, life pulsed deeper. Who acts: joy, life. 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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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/9/21/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter VIII, sentence 21

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But in the water joy lay deeper, life pulsed deeper.

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**Who acts:** joy, life · **What happens:** lie, pulse · **To what, where:** water

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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 (joy, life), 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:pg2892:193`): 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:pg2892:9:21
# text = But in the water joy lay deeper, life pulsed deeper.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
2	in	in	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	water	water	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obl	_	_
5	joy	joy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
6	lay	lie	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	deeper	deep	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	6	advmod	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
9	life	life	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
10	pulsed	pulse	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	parataxis	_	_
11	deeper	deep	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	10	advmod	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **lie** | past | joy |  |  | the water |  | deep *property* | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent in water=Location |
| 2 | **pulse** | past | life |  |  |  |  | deep *property* | vn modes\_of\_being\_with\_motion-47.3 «NP V»: agent=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:** 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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