---
title: "We have great news," said they. " — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: "We have great news," said they. " Who acts: We, robes. A sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Fair, Brown, and Trembling, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Celtic Fairy Tales, Fair, Brown, and Trembling, sentence 24

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"We have great news," said they. "

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**Who acts:** We, robes · **What happens:** have, say · **To what, where:** great news · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Fair, Brown, and Trembling. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (We, robes), 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:pg7885:23:24
# text = "We have great news," said they. "
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	We	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	have	have	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	8	ccomp	_	_
4	great	great	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	news	news	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
8	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
11	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	8	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **have** *in a quote* | present | We | great news |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent news=Patient |
| 2 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | robes *= robe* |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |

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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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