---
title: ‘What did you say, wife?’ — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘What did you say, wife?’ Who acts: you. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of the Fisherman and His Wife, 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/pg7277/54/185/)

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# The Green Fairy Book, The Story of the Fisherman and His Wife, sentence 185

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‘What did you say, wife?’

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** say · **To what, where:** wife · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of the Fisherman and His Wife. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (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:pg7277:54:185
# text = ‘What did you say, wife?’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	5	obj	_	_
3	did	do	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=2|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
5	say	say	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
7	wife	wife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	5	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 · do-support | you | wife |  |  |  |  | vn pronounce-29.3.1 «NP V NP NP»: agent=Agent what=Theme wife=Manner |

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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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