---
title: "I would go if I had a new dress to wear." — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: "I would go if I had a new dress to wear." Who acts: henwife. 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 54

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"I would go if I had a new dress to wear."

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**Who acts:** henwife · **What happens:** go, have, wear · **To what, where:** new dress

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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 (henwife), 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:pg7885:23:54
# text = "I would go if I had a new dress to wear."
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
3	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
4	go	go	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	7	mark	_	_
6	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
7	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	advcl	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
9	new	new	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	dress	dress	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	_
11	to	to	PART	TO	_	12	mark	_	_
12	wear	wear	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	acl	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	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 | **go** *in a quote* | would | the henwife *= henwife* |  |  |  |  |  | vn disappearance-48.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **have** *a condition, not said to happen, in a quote* | past | the henwife *= henwife* | a new dress |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent dress=Patient |
| 3 | **wear** *in a quote* | to-infinitive | the henwife *= henwife* *not said here* | a new dress *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn wipe\_manner-10.4.1-1 «NP V PP-Conative»: 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:** «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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