---
title: It must be very miserable to be a little bird! — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: It must be very miserable to be a little bird! Who acts: daylight. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Witch in the Stone Boat(31), 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/pg640/47/159/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Witch in the Stone Boat(31), sentence 159

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It must be very miserable to be a little bird!

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**Who acts:** daylight · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** little bird

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Witch in the Stone Boat(31). The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (daylight), 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:pg640:47:159
# text = It must be very miserable to be a little bird!
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
2	must	must	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
3	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	cop	_	_
4	very	very	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
5	miserable	miserable	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
6	to	to	PART	TO	_	10	mark	_	_
7	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	cop	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
9	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	bird	bird	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	advcl	_	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** | must | daylight |  |  |  |  | miserable *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **is a** | to-infinitive | daylight *not said here* | a little bird |  |  |  |  | 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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