---
title: ‘What news is there?’ asked the eldest. — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘What news is there?’ asked the eldest. Who acts: news, eldest. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars, sentence 7

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‘What news is there?’ asked the eldest.

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**Who acts:** news, eldest · **What happens:** be, ask · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (news, eldest), 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:pg641:239`): 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:pg641:4:7
# text = ‘What news is there?’ asked the eldest.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	_
2	What	what	DET	WDT	PronType=Int	3	det	_	_
3	news	news	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	is	be	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	8	ccomp	_	_
5	there	there	PRON	EX	_	4	expl	_	_
6	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
7	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
8	asked	ask	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	eldest	eld	ADJ	JJS	Degree=Sup	8	nsubj	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **be** | present | what news |  |  | there |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **ask** *speech: ask* | past | the eldest |  |  |  |  |  | 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 Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 641 (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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