---
title: How in the world can they call me ugly? — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: How in the world can they call me ugly? Who acts: gypsies. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Canary, 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/pg540/40/179/)

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Enchanted Canary, sentence 179

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How in the world can they call me ugly?

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**Who acts:** gypsies · **What happens:** call · **To what, where:** me · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Canary. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (gypsies), 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:pg540:40:179
# text = How in the world can they call me ugly?
1	How	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	7	advmod	_	_
2	in	in	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	world	world	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	obl	_	_
5	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
6	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
7	call	call	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
8	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	7	obj	_	_
9	ugly	ugly	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **call** | can | gypsies *= gypsy* |  | me |  |  | ugly *property* | vn initiate\_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient |

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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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