---
title: ‘But what a pity to drown such a pretty Princess!’ — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘But what a pity to drown such a pretty Princess!’ A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Princess Rosette, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, Princess Rosette, sentence 133

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‘But what a pity to drown such a pretty Princess!’

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**What happens:** drown · **To what, where:** pretty Princess

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Princess Rosette. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: 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:pg540:11:133
# text = ‘But what a pity to drown such a pretty Princess!’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
3	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	5	nsubj	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	pity	pity	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
6	to	to	PART	TO	_	7	mark	_	_
7	drown	drown	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	acl	_	_
8	such	such	DET	PDT	PronType=Ind	11	det:predet	_	_
9	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
10	pretty	pretty	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	Princess	princess	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **drown** | to-infinitive |  | such pretty Princess |  |  |  |  | vn poison-42.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent princess=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 Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 540 (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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