---
title: Why the Fish Laughed. — Indian Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Why the Fish Laughed. Who acts: Fish. A sentence of «Indian Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Demon With Matted Hair " 196, part 19, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Indian Fairy Tales, Demon With Matted Hair " 196, part 19, sentence 95

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Why the Fish Laughed.

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**Who acts:** Fish · **What happens:** laugh

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This is a sentence of «Indian Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Demon With Matted Hair " 196, part 19. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Fish), 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:pg7128:25:95
# text = Why the Fish Laughed.
1	Why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	4	advmod	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	Fish	Fish	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	Laughed	laugh	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **laugh** | past | the Fish |  |  |  |  |  | vn nonverbal\_expression-40.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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:** «Indian Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7128 (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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