---
title: Oh! what stories the people had to tell! — The Pink Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Oh! what stories the people had to tell! Who acts: people. A sentence of «The Pink Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Pink Fairy Book, part 5, 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/pg5615/5/50/)

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# The Pink Fairy Book, The Pink Fairy Book, part 5, sentence 50

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Oh! what stories the people had to tell!

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**Who acts:** people · **What happens:** have, tell · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Pink Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Pink Fairy Book, part 5. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (people), 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:pg5615:5:50
# text = Oh! what stories the people had to tell!
1	Oh	oh	INTJ	UH	_	3	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
3	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	0	root	_	_
4	stories	story	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	nsubj	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nsubj	_	_
7	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	acl:relcl	_	_
8	to	to	PART	TO	_	9	mark	_	_
9	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	7	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **have** | past | the people |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | to-infinitive | the people *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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 Pink Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 5615 (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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