---
title: He sang this song: — Kaffir folk-lore · tree and pragmatics
description: He sang this song: Who acts: boy. A sentence of «Kaffir folk-lore» by George McCall Theal, The Story of the Bird That Made Milk. II., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Kaffir folk-lore, The Story of the Bird That Made Milk. II., sentence 86

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He sang this song:

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**Who acts:** boy · **What happens:** sing · **To what, where:** song

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This is a sentence of «Kaffir folk-lore» by George McCall Theal, The Story of the Bird That Made Milk. II.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (boy), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Mova's own parse.** This tree may be wrong.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg71335:4:86
# text = He sang this song:
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	sang	sing	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	this	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	4	det	_	_
4	song	song	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **sing** *speech: express* | past | boy | this song |  |  |  |  | vn sound\_emission-43.2 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location song=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:** «Kaffir folk-lore» by George McCall Theal, Project Gutenberg book 71335 (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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