---
title: A poor woman had three sons. — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: A poor woman had three sons. Who acts: poor woman. A sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Jack and His Master, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Celtic Fairy Tales, Jack and His Master, sentence 1

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A poor woman had three sons.

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**Who acts:** poor woman · **What happens:** have · **To what, where:** three sons

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This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Jack and His Master. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (poor woman), 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:pg7885:24:1
# text = A poor woman had three sons.
1	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	poor	poor	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	woman	woman	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	three	three	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	6	nummod	_	_
6	sons	son	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **have** | past | a poor woman | three sons |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent son=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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