---
title: What a pretty figure I should cut if I went back into the world!’ — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: What a pretty figure I should cut if I went back into the world!’ Who acts: pretty figure, I. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Little Soldier, 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/pg7277/22/254/)

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# The Green Fairy Book, The Little Soldier, sentence 254

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What a pretty figure I should cut if I went back into the world!’

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**Who acts:** pretty figure, I · **What happens:** cut, go back · **To what, where:** world

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Little Soldier. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (pretty figure, I), 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:pg7277:22:254
# text = What a pretty figure I should cut if I went back into the world!’
1	What	what	DET	WDT	PronType=Int	4	det:predet	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	pretty	pretty	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	figure	figure	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
5	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
6	should	should	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
7	cut	cut	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
8	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	10	mark	_	_
9	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
10	went	go	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	7	advcl	_	_
11	back	back	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
12	into	into	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
13	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
14	world	world	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
16	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **cut** | should | what pretty figure |  |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer |
| 2 | **go back** *a condition, not said to happen* | past | I |  |  | the world |  |  | vn convert-26.6.2 «NP V S\_ING»: agent=Patient |

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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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