---
title: He asked her to speak the words over and over again. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: He asked her to speak the words over and over again. Who acts: Wilhelm. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Antonio Canova., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Antonio Canova., sentence 225

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He asked her to speak the words over and over again.

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**Who acts:** Wilhelm · **What happens:** ask, speak · **To what, where:** word, words · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Antonio Canova.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Wilhelm), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg18442:1898`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg18442:54:225
# text = He asked her to speak the words over and over again.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	asked	ask	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	her	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	obj	_	_
4	to	to	PART	TO	_	5	mark	_	_
5	speak	speak	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	xcomp	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	words	word	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	obj	_	_
8	over	over	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	over	over	ADV	RB	_	8	conj	_	_
11	again	again	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **ask** *speech: ask* | past | Wilhelm |  | word |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP whether S\_INF»: agent=Agent she=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 2 | **speak** *speech: other* *not said to happen* | to-infinitive | Wilhelm *not said here* | the words |  |  | again | over *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:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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