---
title: And the harp played a very soft, sad air. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: And the harp played a very soft, sad air. Who acts: harp. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Talking Harp., 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/pg540/19/17/)

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Talking Harp., sentence 17

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And the harp played a very soft, sad air.

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**Who acts:** harp · **What happens:** play · **To what, where:** soft sad air

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Talking Harp.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (harp), 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:pg540:19:17
# text = And the harp played a very soft, sad air.
1	And	and	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	harp	harp	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	played	play	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
6	very	very	ADV	RB	_	7	advmod	_	_
7	soft	soft	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
9	sad	sad	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	air	air	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **play** | past | the harp | a soft sad air |  |  |  |  | vn use-105.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent air=Theme |

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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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