---
title: ‘Oh, woe is me!’ wailed the ogress. — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Oh, woe is me!’ wailed the ogress. Who acts: me. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Halfman, 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/pg641/41/40/)

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Story of Halfman, sentence 40

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‘Oh, woe is me!’ wailed the ogress.

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**Who acts:** me · **What happens:** be, wail · **To what, where:** me, ogress

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Halfman. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (me), 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:pg641:41:40
# text = ‘Oh, woe is me!’ wailed the ogress.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	9	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Oh	oh	INTJ	UH	_	4	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
4	woe	woe	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	appos	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
6	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	9	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
9	wailed	wail	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
10	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	ogress	ogress	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | present |  | me |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **wail** | past | me | the ogress |  |  |  |  | vn animal\_sounds-38 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent ogress=Theme |

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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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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