---
title: “You can give me neither help nor comfort.” — The Crimson Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: “You can give me neither help nor comfort.” Who acts: You, neither. A sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 17, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2435/17/57/)

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# The Crimson Fairy Book, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 17, sentence 57

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“You can give me neither help nor comfort.”

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**Who acts:** You, neither · **What happens:** give, help · **To what, where:** help, father

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This is a sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 17. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (You, neither), 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:pg2435:17:57
# text = “You can give me neither help nor comfort.”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	You	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
3	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
4	give	give	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	iobj	_	_
6	neither	neither	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	7	nmod:poss	_	_
7	help	help	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
8	nor	nor	CCONJ	CC	Polarity=Neg	9	cc	_	_
9	comfort	comfort	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **give** *in a quote* | can | You | neither's help nor comfort | father |  |  |  | vn give-13.1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent i=Recipient help=Theme |
| 2 | **help** *in a quote* |  | neither |  |  |  |  |  | nom help «act transitive»: poss=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 Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 2435 (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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