---
title: “Why,” they say, “matter enough! — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “Why,” they say, “matter enough! Who acts: people. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Three Sillies, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Three Sillies, sentence 47

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“Why,” they say, “matter enough!

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**Who acts:** people · **What happens:** say · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Three Sillies. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (people), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg7439:240`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg7439:7:47
# text = “Why,” they say, “matter enough!
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	9	punct	_	_
2	Why	why	INTJ	UH	_	9	discourse	_	_
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
4	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
5	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
6	say	say	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	parataxis	_	_
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
8	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	9	punct	_	_
9	matter	matter	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
10	enough	enough	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
11	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: assert* | present | people |  |  |  |  |  | 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:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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