---
title: Alexander greeted him and said,-- — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: Alexander greeted him and said,-- Who acts: Alexander. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Diogenes the Wise Man., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Diogenes the Wise Man., sentence 16

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Alexander greeted him and said,--

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**Who acts:** Alexander · **What happens:** greet, say · **To what, where:** man · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Diogenes the Wise Man.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Alexander), 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:pg18442:38:16
# text = Alexander greeted him and said,--
1	Alexander	Alexander	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	greeted	greet	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	obj	_	_
4	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
5	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	--	--	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **greet** *speech: greet* | past | Alexander |  | man |  |  |  | vn judgment-33.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent he=Theme |
| 2 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | Alexander *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=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:** «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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