---
title: Fairies are not long in doing their business. — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Fairies are not long in doing their business. Who acts: Fairies. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Blue Fairy Book, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, sentence 39

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Fairies are not long in doing their business.

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**Who acts:** Fairies · **What happens:** not be, do · **To what, where:** business

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Fairies), 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:pg503:10:39
# text = Fairies are not long in doing their business.
1	Fairies	fairy	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
2	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	cop	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	long	long	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
5	in	in	SCONJ	IN	_	6	mark	_	_
6	doing	do	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	4	advcl	_	_
7	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	business	business	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **is** | present | Fairies |  |  |  |  | long *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **do** | gerund | Fairies *not said here* | fairies's business |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent business=Eventuality |

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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 Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 503 (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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