---
title: I was trying to console your dear wives.” — The Brown Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: I was trying to console your dear wives.” Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 19, 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/pg3282/19/148/)

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# The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 19, sentence 148

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I was trying to console your dear wives.”

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** try · **To what, where:** console

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This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 19. 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:pg3282:19:148
# text = I was trying to console your dear wives.”
1	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	trying	try	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
4	to	to	PART	TO	_	5	mark	_	_
5	console	console	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	xcomp	_	_
6	your	your	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
7	dear	dear	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	wives	wife	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **try** | past · progressive | I | console  your dear wives |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer |

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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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