---
title: ‘The courtyard might be full of thieves and he’d never discover it. — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘The courtyard might be full of thieves and he’d never discover it. Who acts: courtyard, husband. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The War of the Wolf and the Fox, 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/pg7277/53/17/)

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# The Green Fairy Book, The War of the Wolf and the Fox, sentence 17

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‘The courtyard might be full of thieves and he’d never discover it.

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**Who acts:** courtyard, husband · **What happens:** be, not discover · **To what, where:** courtyard

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The War of the Wolf and the Fox. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (courtyard, husband), 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:pg7277:53:17
# text = ‘The courtyard might be full of thieves and he’d never discover it.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	courtyard	courtyard	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
4	might	might	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
5	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	cop	_	_
6	full	full	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
7	of	of	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	thieves	thief	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obl	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	13	cc	_	_
10	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	13	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	’d	have	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	13	aux	_	_
12	never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	13	advmod	_	_
13	discover	discover	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	conj	_	_
14	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	13	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | might | the courtyard |  |  |  |  | of thieves; full *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **not** **discover** | past | husband | courtyard |  |  |  |  | vn discover-84-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Topic |

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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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