---
title: What can it mean?’ — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: What can it mean?’ Who acts: child. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Cat and the Mouse in Partnership, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Cat and the Mouse in Partnership, sentence 49

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What can it mean?’

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**Who acts:** child · **What happens:** mean

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Cat and the Mouse in Partnership. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (child), 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:pg640:3:49
# text = What can it mean?’
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	4	obj	_	_
2	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
4	mean	mean	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | can | child |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=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 Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 640 (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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