---
title: “Wash me, and comb me, And lay me down softly. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “Wash me, and comb me, And lay me down softly. Who acts: you. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Three Heads of the Well, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Three Heads of the Well, sentence 19

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“Wash me, and comb me, And lay me down softly.

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** wash, comb, lay down · **To what, where:** golden head

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Three Heads of the Well. 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:pg7439:49:19
# text = “Wash me, and comb me, And lay me down softly.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Wash	wash	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
5	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	comb	comb	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
7	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
9	And	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	lay	lay	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
11	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	10	obj	_	_
12	down	down	ADP	RP	_	10	compound:prt	_	_
13	softly	softly	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **wash** *in a quote* | imperative | you *not said here* | a golden head *= head* |  |  |  |  | vn floss-41.2.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent i=Patient |
| 2 | **comb** *in a quote* | infinitive | you *not said here* | a golden head *= head* |  |  |  |  | vn braid-41.2.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent i=Patient |
| 3 | **lay down** *in a quote* | infinitive | you *not said here* | a golden head *= head* |  |  |  | softly *property* | vn create-26.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent i=Result |

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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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