---
title: "Tell me, glass, tell me true! — Grimm's Fairy Stories · tree and pragmatics
description: "Tell me, glass, tell me true! Who acts: you. A sentence of «Grimm's Fairy Stories» by Jacob Grimm, Little Snow White, 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/pg11027/11/36/)

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# Grimm's Fairy Stories, Little Snow White, sentence 36

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"Tell me, glass, tell me true!

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** tell · **To what, where:** glass, White · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Grimm's Fairy Stories» by Jacob Grimm, Little Snow White. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you), 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:pg11027:11:36
# text = "Tell me, glass, tell me true!
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	iobj	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	_
5	glass	glass	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
7	tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
8	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	7	iobj	_	_
9	true	true	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* *in a quote* | imperative | you *not said here* | glass | White |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent i=Recipient glass=Topic |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* *in a quote* | infinitive | you *not said here* |  | White |  |  | true *property* | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient |

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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:** «Grimm's Fairy Stories» by Jacob Grimm, Project Gutenberg book 11027 (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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