---
title: ‘And why not?’ said his wife. — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘And why not?’ said his wife. 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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# The Green Fairy Book, The Story of the Fisherman and His Wife, sentence 81

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‘And why not?’ said his wife.

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**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: 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:pg7277:54:81
# text = ‘And why not?’ said his wife.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	And	and	CCONJ	CC	_	3	cc	_	_
3	why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	7	advmod	_	_
4	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	3	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
7	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
8	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	9	nmod:poss	_	_
9	wife	wife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	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 |  | king's wife |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent wife=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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