---
title: Tell us--what taps?" — The Book of Dragons · tree and pragmatics
description: Tell us--what taps?" Who acts: you. A sentence of «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Opening, part 6, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Book of Dragons, Opening, part 6, sentence 42

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Tell us--what taps?"

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** tell, tap · **To what, where:** us · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Opening, part 6. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you), 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:pg23661:6:42
# text = Tell us--what taps?"
1	Tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	us	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	1	iobj	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	--	--	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	5	nsubj	_	_
5	taps	tap	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	1	parataxis	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | imperative | you *not said here* |  | us |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent we=Recipient |
| 2 | **tap** | present |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn investigate-35.4 «NP V NP.location»: agent=Agent |

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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 Book of Dragons» by E. Nesbit, Project Gutenberg book 23661 (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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