---
title: But the bear chief only laughed, and said nothing. — The Brown Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: But the bear chief only laughed, and said nothing. Who acts: bear chief. A sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 15, 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/pg3282/15/17/)

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# The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 15, sentence 17

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But the bear chief only laughed, and said nothing.

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**Who acts:** bear chief · **What happens:** laugh, say · **To what, where:** nothing · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 15. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (bear chief), 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:pg3282:15:17
# text = But the bear chief only laughed, and said nothing.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	bear	bear	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	compound	_	_
4	chief	chief	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
5	only	only	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
6	laughed	laugh	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
9	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	conj	_	_
10	nothing	nothing	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Neg	9	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **laugh** | past | the bear chief |  |  |  |  |  | vn nonverbal\_expression-40.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | the bear chief *not said here* | nothing |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent nothing=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:** «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3282 (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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