---
title: May I not ask your name?” — Andersen's Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: May I not ask your name?” Who acts: I, your. A sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The False Collar, 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/pg1597/22/5/)

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# Andersen's Fairy Tales, The False Collar, sentence 5

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May I not ask your name?”

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**Who acts:** I, your · **What happens:** not ask, name · **To what, where:** name

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This is a sentence of «Andersen's Fairy Tales» by H. C. Andersen, The False Collar. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I, your), 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:pg1597:22:5
# text = May I not ask your name?”
1	May	may	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	ask	ask	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	your	your	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
6	name	name	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **ask** *speech: ask* | may | I | your name |  |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent name=Recipient |
| 2 | **name** |  | your |  |  |  |  |  | nom name «communication transitive»: poss=agent |

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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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