---
title: What dress would you like?" asked the henwife. — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: What dress would you like?" asked the henwife. Who acts: dress. 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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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7885/23/56/)

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# Celtic Fairy Tales, Fair, Brown, and Trembling, sentence 56

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What dress would you like?" asked the henwife.

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**Who acts:** dress · **What happens:** like, ask · **To what, where:** henwife

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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 (dress), 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:pg7885:23:56
# text = What dress would you like?" asked the henwife.
1	What	what	DET	WDT	PronType=Int	2	det	_	_
2	dress	dress	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
3	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
5	like	like	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
8	asked	ask	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	conj	_	_
9	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	henwife	henwife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **like** | would | what dress |  |  |  |  |  | vn want-32.1-1-1 «NP V NP S\_INF»: agent=Pivot |
| 2 | **ask** *speech: ask* *in a quote* | past | what dress *not said here* | the henwife |  |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent henwife=Recipient |

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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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