---
title: To tell the truth, I even ate up a shepherd now and then. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: To tell the truth, I even ate up a shepherd now and then. Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Animals and the Plague, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Animals and the Plague, sentence 13

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To tell the truth, I even ate up a shepherd now and then.

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** tell, eat up · **To what, where:** truth, shepherd · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Animals and the Plague. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), 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:pg19994:125:13
# text = To tell the truth, I even ate up a shepherd now and then.
1	To	to	PART	TO	_	2	mark	_	_
2	tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	truth	truth	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
6	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
7	even	even	ADV	RB	_	8	advmod	_	_
8	ate	eat	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	ccomp	_	_
9	up	up	ADP	RP	_	8	compound:prt	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	shepherd	shepherd	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obj	_	_
12	now	now	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	8	advmod	_	_
13	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	14	cc	_	_
14	then	then	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	12	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | to-infinitive |  | the truth |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP S\_INF»: agent=Agent truth=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 2 | **eat up** | past | I | a shepherd |  |  | now |  | vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent shepherd=Patient |

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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:** «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, Project Gutenberg book 19994 (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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