---
title: Mercury asked the Woodman. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: Mercury asked the Woodman. Who acts: Mercury. A sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, Mercury and the Woodman, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Aesop for Children, Mercury and the Woodman, sentence 11

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Mercury asked the Woodman.

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**Who acts:** Mercury · **What happens:** ask · **To what, where:** Woodman

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This is a sentence of «The Aesop for Children» by Aesop, Mercury and the Woodman. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Mercury), 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:pg19994:93:11
# text = Mercury asked the Woodman.
1	Mercury	Mercury	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	asked	ask	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	Woodman	Woodman	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	iobj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	.	.	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 | Mercury |  | the Woodman |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent woodman=Recipient |

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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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