---
title: He said, ‘Haven’t you seen a stag about here?’ — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: He said, ‘Haven’t you seen a stag about here?’ Who acts: stag, you. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Golden Lads, 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/pg7277/49/74/)

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# The Green Fairy Book, The Golden Lads, sentence 74

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He said, ‘Haven’t you seen a stag about here?’

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**Who acts:** stag, you · **What happens:** say, not see · **To what, where:** stag · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Golden Lads. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (stag, you), 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:pg7277:49:74
# text = He said, ‘Haven’t you seen a stag about here?’
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
4	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	8	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	Have	have	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	8	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	8	advmod	_	_
7	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
8	seen	see	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	2	ccomp	_	_
9	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	stag	stag	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obj	_	_
11	about	about	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
12	here	here	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	8	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | stag |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **not** **see** | infinitive · perfect | you | a stag |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer stag=Stimulus |

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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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