---
title: Immediately a soft voice said in his ear: — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Immediately a soft voice said in his ear: Who acts: soft voice. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Golden Branch, part 3, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Golden Branch, part 3, sentence 45

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Immediately a soft voice said in his ear:

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**Who acts:** soft voice · **What happens:** say · **To what, where:** ear · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Golden Branch, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (soft voice), 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:pg540:36:45
# text = Immediately a soft voice said in his ear:
1	Immediately	immediately	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	soft	soft	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	voice	voice	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
5	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	in	in	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
7	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	ear	ear	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | a soft voice |  |  | voice's ear |  | immediately *property* | vn pronounce-29.3.1 «NP V NP PP.manner»: agent=Agent in ear=Manner |

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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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