---
title: Couldn’t we have a game of catch with that golden ball of yours?” — The Brown Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Couldn’t we have a game of catch with that golden ball of yours?” Who acts: we. A sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 29, 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/pg3282/29/3/)

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# The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 29, sentence 3

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Couldn’t we have a game of catch with that golden ball of yours?”

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**Who acts:** we · **What happens:** not have · **To what, where:** game

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This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 29. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (we), 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:pg3282:29:3
# text = Couldn’t we have a game of catch with that golden ball of yours?”
1	Could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
3	we	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
4	have	have	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	game	game	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
7	of	of	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	catch	catch	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	_
9	with	with	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
10	that	that	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	12	det	_	_
11	golden	golden	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	amod	_	_
12	ball	ball	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nmod	_	_
13	of	of	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
14	yours	your	PRON	PRP	Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	12	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
16	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **have** | could | we | a game of catch with that golden ball of yours |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent game=Patient |

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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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