---
title: ‘What is my brother saying?’ asked his sister again. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘What is my brother saying?’ asked his sister again. Who acts: brother, sister. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Bushy Bride, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, Bushy Bride, sentence 69

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‘What is my brother saying?’ asked his sister again.

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**Who acts:** brother, sister · **What happens:** say, ask · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Bushy Bride. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (brother, sister), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg540:3817`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg540:47:69
# text = ‘What is my brother saying?’ asked his sister again.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	_
2	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	6	obj	_	_
3	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
4	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	5	nmod:poss	_	_
5	brother	brother	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
6	saying	say	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	9	ccomp	_	_
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
8	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	9	punct	_	_
9	asked	ask	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
10	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	11	nmod:poss	_	_
11	sister	sister	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
12	again	again	ADV	RB	_	9	advmod	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: assert* | present · progressive | my brother |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent what=Topic |
| 2 | **ask** *speech: ask* | past | King's sister |  |  |  | again |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V how S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |

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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:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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