---
title: “Can you wash this shirt clean?” he cried. — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: “Can you wash this shirt clean?” he cried. Who acts: you, troll. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Blue Fairy Book, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, sentence 151

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“Can you wash this shirt clean?” he cried.

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**Who acts:** you, troll · **What happens:** wash, cry · **To what, where:** shirt · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, troll), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg503:366`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg503:4:151
# text = “Can you wash this shirt clean?” he cried.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	_
2	Can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
4	wash	wash	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	11	ccomp	_	_
5	this	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	6	det	_	_
6	shirt	shirt	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
7	clean	clean	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	xcomp	_	_
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
9	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
10	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	_
11	cried	cry	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	11	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **wash** *in a quote* | can | you | this shirt |  |  |  | clean *property* | vn floss-41.2.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent shirt=Patient |
| 2 | **cry** *speech: express* | past | troll |  |  |  |  |  | vn manner\_speaking-37.3 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |

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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:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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