---
title: “What,” said she, “shall I do with this little sixpence? — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “What,” said she, “shall I do with this little sixpence? Who acts: I. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Old Woman and Her Pig, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Old Woman and Her Pig, sentence 2

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“What,” said she, “shall I do with this little sixpence?

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** say, do · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Old Woman and Her Pig. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), 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:pg7439:9:2
# text = “What,” said she, “shall I do with this little sixpence?
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	5	nsubj:outer	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
5	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	she	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
8	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	11	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	shall	shall	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	11	aux	_	_
10	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	_
11	do	do	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	ccomp	_	_
12	with	with	ADP	IN	_	15	case	_	_
13	this	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	15	det	_	_
14	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	15	amod	_	_
15	sixpence	sixpence	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
16	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: ask* | past |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **do** *in a quote* | shall | I |  |  |  |  | with this little sixpence | vn act-114-1 «NP V»: 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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