---
title: "What colour do you want the mare to be?" — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: "What colour do you want the mare to be?" Who acts: colour, mare. 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 34

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"What colour do you want the mare to be?"

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**Who acts:** colour, mare · **What happens:** want, be · **To what, where:** mare

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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 (colour, mare), 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:pg7885:23:34
# text = "What colour do you want the mare to be?"
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	What	what	DET	WDT	PronType=Int	3	det	_	_
3	colour	colour	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
4	do	do	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
5	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
6	want	want	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	mare	mare	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	_
9	to	to	PART	TO	_	10	mark	_	_
10	be	be	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **want** *in a quote* | present · do-support | what colour | the mare |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **be** *not said to happen, in a quote* | to-infinitive | the mare *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

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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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