---
title: Pray tell me how you escaped death." — The Arabian Nights Entertainments · tree and pragmatics
description: Pray tell me how you escaped death." Who acts: you. A sentence of «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 18, 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/pg128/18/91/)

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# The Arabian Nights Entertainments, Opening, part 18, sentence 91

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Pray tell me how you escaped death."

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** pray, tell, escape · **To what, where:** me, death · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 18. 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:pg128:18:91
# text = Pray tell me how you escaped death."
1	Pray	pray	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	1	conj	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	iobj	_	_
4	how	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	6	advmod	_	_
5	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
6	escaped	escape	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=2|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	ccomp	_	_
7	death	death	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **pray** | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn long-32.2 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Pivot |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | infinitive | you *not said here* |  | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP what S»: agent=Agent i=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 3 | **escape** | past | you | death |  |  |  |  | vn escape-51.1-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Theme death=Initial\_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:** «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 128 (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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