---
title: About mid-day who should come but Auburn Mary. — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: About mid-day who should come but Auburn Mary. A sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Battle of the Birds, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 123

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About mid-day who should come but Auburn Mary.

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**What happens:** come

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This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Battle of the Birds. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: 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:pg7885:31:123
# text = About mid-day who should come but Auburn Mary.
1	About	about	ADP	IN	_	2	case	_	_
2	mid-day	mid-day	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	_
3	who	who	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	5	nsubj	_	_
4	should	should	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
5	come	come	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
6	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	7	cc	_	_
7	Auburn	Auburn	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	5	conj	_	_
8	Mary	Mary	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	7	flat	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **come** | should |  |  |  |  |  | about mid-day | vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme about mid-day=Location |

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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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