---
title: This poisoned iron pains me like the bite of a gad-fly. — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: This poisoned iron pains me like the bite of a gad-fly. Who acts: poisoned iron. A sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Wooing of Olwen, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Celtic Fairy Tales, The Wooing of Olwen, sentence 63

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This poisoned iron pains me like the bite of a gad-fly.

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**Who acts:** poisoned iron · **What happens:** poison, pain, bite · **To what, where:** me, gad fly

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This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Wooing of Olwen. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (poisoned iron), 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:pg7885:17:63
# text = This poisoned iron pains me like the bite of a gad-fly.
1	This	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	3	det	_	_
2	poisoned	poison	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	3	amod	_	_
3	iron	iron	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	pains	pain	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	obj	_	_
6	like	like	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	bite	bite	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	_
9	of	of	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
11	gad	gad	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	compound	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	11	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	fly	fly	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **poison** | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn poison-42.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **pain** | present | this poisoned iron | me |  |  |  | like the bite of a gad fly | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus i=Experiencer |
| 3 | **bite** |  |  | a gad fly |  |  |  |  | nom bite «state transitive»: of=patient |

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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:** «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7885 (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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