---
title: But Mercury did not give them the golden axe. — The Aesop for Children · tree and pragmatics
description: But Mercury did not give them the golden axe. 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 25

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But Mercury did not give them the golden axe.

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**Who acts:** Mercury · **What happens:** not give · **To what, where:** golden axe, gold

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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:pg19994:93:25
# text = But Mercury did not give them the golden axe.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
2	Mercury	Mercury	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
3	did	do	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	5	advmod	_	_
5	give	give	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
6	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	iobj	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	golden	golden	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	axe	axe	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **give** | past · do-support | Mercury | the golden axe | gold |  |  |  | vn give-13.1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent they=Recipient axe=Theme |

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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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