---
title: They were your twelve brothers. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: They were your twelve brothers. Who acts: flowers. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Twelve Brothers, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Twelve Brothers, sentence 72

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They were your twelve brothers.

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**Who acts:** flowers · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** twelve brothers

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Twelve Brothers. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (flowers), 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:pg540:41:72
# text = They were your twelve brothers.
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
2	were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
3	your	your	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	5	nmod:poss	_	_
4	twelve	twelve	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	5	nummod	_	_
5	brothers	brother	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | past | flowers *= flower* | your twelve brothers |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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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