---
title: The Irishman was little more than alive by this time. — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: The Irishman was little more than alive by this time. Who acts: Irishman. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Blue Mountains, 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/pg640/45/42/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Blue Mountains, sentence 42

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The Irishman was little more than alive by this time.

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**Who acts:** Irishman · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Blue Mountains. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Irishman), 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:pg640:45:42
# text = The Irishman was little more than alive by this time.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	Irishman	Irishman	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
3	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
4	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	obl:unmarked	_	_
5	more	more	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	0	root	_	_
6	than	than	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
7	alive	alive	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	obl	_	_
8	by	by	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
9	this	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	10	det	_	_
10	time	time	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | past | the Irishman |  |  |  | time | than alive; little *obl:unmarked*; more *property* | 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 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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