---
title: "Command it, O king! and it will obey," said one. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: "Command it, O king! and it will obey," said one. Who acts: No.. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, King Canute on the Seashore., 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/pg18442/5/18/)

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, King Canute on the Seashore., sentence 18

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"Command it, O king! and it will obey," said one.

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**Who acts:** No. · **What happens:** command, obey, say · **To what, where:** No., one · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, King Canute on the Seashore.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (No.), 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:pg18442:5:18
# text = "Command it, O king! and it will obey," said one.
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Command	command	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	14	ccomp	_	_
3	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
5	O	of	ADP	IN	Abbr=Yes	6	case	_	_
6	king	king	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
9	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	_
10	will	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	11	aux	_	_
11	obey	obey	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
14	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
15	one	one	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	14	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	14	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **command** *in a quote* | infinitive |  | No. |  |  |  | of king | vn supervision-95.2.2-1 «NP V NP.predicate»: agent=Agent it=Eventuality |
| 2 | **obey** *in a quote* | future | No. |  |  |  |  |  | vn abide\_by-93.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **say** *speech: express* | past |  | one |  |  |  |  | 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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