---
title: It certainly was a marvellous sight. — The Happy Prince, and Other Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: It certainly was a marvellous sight. Who acts: wonder. A sentence of «The Happy Prince, and Other Tales» by Oscar Wilde, Opening, part 3, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Happy Prince, and Other Tales, Opening, part 3, sentence 127

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It certainly was a marvellous sight.

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**Who acts:** wonder · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** marvellous sight

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This is a sentence of «The Happy Prince, and Other Tales» by Oscar Wilde, Opening, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (wonder), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg902:331`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg902:3:127
# text = It certainly was a marvellous sight.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
2	certainly	certainly	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
3	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	marvellous	marvellous	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	sight	sight	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | past | wonder | a marvellous sight |  |  |  | certainly *property* | tree rules |

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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:** «The Happy Prince, and Other Tales» by Oscar Wilde, Project Gutenberg book 902 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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