---
title: I will never confess that I could not see the stuff.” — Andersen's Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: I will never confess that I could not see the stuff.” Who acts: I. A sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Andersen's Fairy Tales, The Emperor's New Clothes, sentence 28

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I will never confess that I could not see the stuff.”

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** not confess, not see · **To what, where:** stuff

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This is a sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), 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:pg1597:2:28
# text = I will never confess that I could not see the stuff.”
1	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
2	will	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	confess	confess	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	that	that	SCONJ	IN	_	9	mark	_	_
6	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	9	nsubj	_	_
7	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	9	aux	_	_
8	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	9	advmod	_	_
9	see	see	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	advcl	_	_
10	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	stuff	stuff	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **confess** | future | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn confess-37.10 «NP V how S»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **not** **see** | could | I | the stuff |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer stuff=Stimulus |

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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:** «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, Project Gutenberg book 1597 (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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