---
title: Perhaps he can tell me how to be happy." — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: Perhaps he can tell me how to be happy." Who acts: England. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Miller of the Dee., 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/pg18442/16/6/)

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Miller of the Dee., sentence 6

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Perhaps he can tell me how to be happy."

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**Who acts:** England · **What happens:** tell, be · **To what, where:** me · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Miller of the Dee.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (England), 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:pg18442:16:6
# text = Perhaps he can tell me how to be happy."
1	Perhaps	perhaps	ADV	RB	_	4	advmod	_	_
2	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
3	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
4	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	iobj	_	_
6	how	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	9	advmod	_	_
7	to	to	PART	TO	_	9	mark	_	_
8	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	9	cop	_	_
9	happy	happy	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | can | England |  | me |  |  | perhaps *property* | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient |
| 2 | **is** | to-infinitive | England *not said here* |  |  |  |  | happy *property* | tree rules |

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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:** «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 18442 (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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