---
title: I wish I had; but my sight is very short.” — The Brown Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: I wish I had; but my sight is very short.” Who acts: I, sight, my. A sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 17, 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/pg3282/17/12/)

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# The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 17, sentence 12

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I wish I had; but my sight is very short.”

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**Who acts:** I, sight, my · **What happens:** wish, have, be, sight · **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 17. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I, sight, my), 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:pg3282:17:12
# text = I wish I had; but my sight is very short.”
1	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	wish	wish	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
4	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	ccomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	;	;	PUNCT	:	_	11	punct	_	_
6	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
7	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	sight	sight	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	nsubj	_	_
9	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	11	cop	_	_
10	very	very	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	_
11	short	short	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **wish** | present | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn wish-62 «NP V for NP S\_INF»: agent=Pivot clause=Theme |
| 2 | **have** | past | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **is** | present | my sight |  |  |  |  | short *property* | tree rules |
| 4 | **sight** |  | my |  |  |  |  |  | nom sight «cognition transitive»: poss=agent |

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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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