---
title: ‘But it will be a long story.’ — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘But it will be a long story.’ Who acts: pleasure. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Prince Vivien and the Princess Placida, part 1, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Green Fairy Book, Prince Vivien and the Princess Placida, part 1, sentence 54

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‘But it will be a long story.’

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**Who acts:** pleasure · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** long story

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Prince Vivien and the Princess Placida, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (pleasure), 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:pg7277:36:54
# text = ‘But it will be a long story.’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	8	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
3	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
4	will	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	8	aux	_	_
5	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	8	cop	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
7	long	long	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	story	story	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	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 | **is a** | future | pleasure | a long story |  |  |  |  | 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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