---
title: “Tell me the way, and I shall find him!” — Andersen's Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “Tell me the way, and I shall find him!” Who acts: you, mother. A sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Story of a Mother, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/21/14/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [Andersen's Fairy Tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/) / [The Story of a Mother](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/21/) / 14

# Andersen's Fairy Tales, The Story of a Mother, sentence 14

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
“Tell me the way, and I shall find him!”

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** you, mother · **What happens:** tell, find · **To what, where:** way, mother, Death · **Speech:** someone speaks here

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The Story of a Mother. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, mother), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg1597:21:14
# text = “Tell me the way, and I shall find him!”
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	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	way	way	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
8	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
9	shall	shall	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	10	aux	_	_
10	find	find	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	conj	_	_
11	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | 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* | the way | the mother *= mother* |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent i=Recipient way=Topic |
| 2 | **find** *in a quote* | shall | the mother *= mother* | Death |  |  |  |  | vn discover-84 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent he=Topic |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/21/13/)
- next →: [sentence 15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/21/15/)
- ↑ back to [The Story of a Mother](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg1597/21/)