---
title: So they opened this and read it, and thought it a shame. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: So they opened this and read it, and thought it a shame. Who acts: robbers. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Fish and the Ring, 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/pg7439/41/30/)

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# English Fairy Tales, The Fish and the Ring, sentence 30

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So they opened this and read it, and thought it a shame.

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**Who acts:** robbers · **What happens:** open, read, think · **To what, where:** this, money

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Fish and the Ring. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (robbers), 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:pg7439:41:30
# text = So they opened this and read it, and thought it a shame.
1	So	so	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
2	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	opened	open	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	this	this	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	3	obj	_	_
5	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	read	read	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	conj	_	_
7	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	thought	think	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	_
11	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	obj	_	_
12	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	shame	shame	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **open** | past | robbers *= robber* | this |  |  |  |  | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6-1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location this=Theme |
| 2 | **read** | infinitive | robbers *= robber* *not said here* | money |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Topic |
| 3 | **think** *speech: other* | past | robbers *= robber* *not said here* | money |  |  |  |  | vn consider-29.9-2 «NP V NP ADJ»: agent=Agent it=Theme shame=Attribute |

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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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