---
title: “At three,” said the wolf. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “At three,” said the wolf. Who acts: wolf. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Story of the Three Little Pigs, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Story of the Three Little Pigs, sentence 54

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“At three,” said the wolf.

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

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Story of the Three Little Pigs. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (wolf), 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:pg7439:17:54
# text = “At three,” said the wolf.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	At	at	ADP	IN	_	3	case	_	_
3	three	three	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	6	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
6	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	wolf	wolf	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	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 | the wolf |  |  | three |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent |

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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:** «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7439 (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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