---
title: But let me tell you something in private. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: But let me tell you something in private. Who acts: you, me. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Wolf and the Lean Dog, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, The Wolf and the Lean Dog, sentence 7

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But let me tell you something in private.

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**Who acts:** you, me · **What happens:** let, tell · **To what, where:** me, something, you, private · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, The Wolf and the Lean Dog. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, me), 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:pg19994:56:7
# text = But let me tell you something in private.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	2	cc	_	_
2	let	let	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	obj	_	_
4	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	xcomp	_	_
5	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	4	iobj	_	_
6	something	something	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	4	obj	_	_
7	in	in	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	private	private	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **let** | imperative | you *not said here* | me |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | infinitive | me *not said here* | something | you | private |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent you=Recipient something=Topic |

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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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