---
title: They told me many things what to do." — More English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: They told me many things what to do." Who acts: brothers. A sentence of «More English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales, part 13, 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/pg14241/27/51/)

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# More English Fairy Tales, More English Fairy Tales, part 13, sentence 51

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They told me many things what to do."

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**Who acts:** brothers · **What happens:** tell, do · **To what, where:** many things, me · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «More English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales, part 13. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (brothers), 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:pg14241:27:51
# text = They told me many things what to do."
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	told	tell	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	iobj	_	_
4	many	many	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	things	thing	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obj	_	_
6	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	8	obj	_	_
7	to	to	PART	TO	_	8	mark	_	_
8	do	do	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	acl:relcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	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* | past | brothers *= brother* | many things | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent i=Recipient thing=Topic |
| 2 | **do** | to-infinitive | brothers *= brother* *not said here* | many things |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Eventuality |

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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:** «More English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 14241 (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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