---
title: But that horrid old wall—I would sooner die!” — The Brown Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: But that horrid old wall—I would sooner die!” Who acts: I. 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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# The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 17, sentence 74

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But that horrid old wall—I would sooner die!”

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** die

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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), 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:pg3282:17:74
# text = But that horrid old wall—I would sooner die!”
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
2	that	that	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	5	nsubj	_	_
3	horrid	horrid	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
4	old	old	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	wall	wall	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	—	-	PUNCT	:	_	10	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
8	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	10	aux	_	_
9	sooner	soon	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	10	advmod	_	_
10	die	die	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	parataxis	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **die** | would | I |  |  |  |  | soon *property* | vn calibratable\_cos-45.6.1 «NP.attribute V»: agent=Attribute |

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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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