---
title: What a pity it is so ruinously expensive!’ — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: What a pity it is so ruinously expensive!’ Who acts: pity. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Prince Featherhead and the Princess Celandine, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Green Fairy Book, Prince Featherhead and the Princess Celandine, sentence 155

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What a pity it is so ruinously expensive!’

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**Who acts:** pity · **What happens:** pity, be

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Prince Featherhead and the Princess Celandine. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (pity), 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:pg7277:12:155
# text = What a pity it is so ruinously expensive!’
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	8	nsubj	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	pity	pity	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	nsubj	_	_
4	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	8	cop	_	_
6	so	so	ADV	RB	_	8	advmod	_	_
7	ruinously	ruinously	ADV	RB	_	8	advmod	_	_
8	expensive	expensive	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **pity** |  | pity |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **is** | present |  |  |  |  |  | expensive, ruinously *property* | 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 Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 7277 (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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