---
title: “Quack, quack, quack,” she said. — The Happy Prince, and Other Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “Quack, quack, quack,” she said. Who acts: Duck. A sentence of «The Happy Prince, and Other Tales» by Oscar Wilde, Opening, part 7, 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/pg902/7/8/)

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# The Happy Prince, and Other Tales, Opening, part 7, sentence 8

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“Quack, quack, quack,” she said.

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**Who acts:** Duck · **What happens:** say · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Happy Prince, and Other Tales» by Oscar Wilde, Opening, part 7. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Duck), 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:pg902:7:8
# text = “Quack, quack, quack,” she said.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Quack	quack	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	ccomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	4	punct	_	_
4	quack	quack	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
6	quack	quack	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
9	she	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
10	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | Duck |  |  |  |  |  | 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:** «The Happy Prince, and Other Tales» by Oscar Wilde, Project Gutenberg book 902 (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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