---
title: "Where is the water, wife?" said the shoemaker. — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: "Where is the water, wife?" said the shoemaker. Who acts: water, shoemaker. 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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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7885/31/235/)

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# Celtic Fairy Tales, The Battle of the Birds, sentence 235

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"Where is the water, wife?" said the shoemaker.

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**Who acts:** water, shoemaker · **What happens:** be, say · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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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: who acts (water, shoemaker), 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:pg7885:31:235
# text = "Where is the water, wife?" said the shoemaker.
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Where	where	ADV	WRB	PronType=Rel	10	advmod	_	_
3	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	cop	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	water	water	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
7	wife	wife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
10	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
11	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	shoemaker	shoemaker	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** *in a quote* | present | the water and wife |  |  |  |  | where *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **say** *speech: ask* | past | the shoemaker |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: 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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