---
title: The man did not need twice telling. — The Crimson Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: The man did not need twice telling. Who acts: man. A sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 32, 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/pg2435/32/41/)

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# The Crimson Fairy Book, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 32, sentence 41

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The man did not need twice telling.

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**Who acts:** man · **What happens:** not need, tell · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 32. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (man), 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:pg2435:32:41
# text = The man did not need twice telling.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	man	man	NOUN	NN	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	need	need	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
6	twice	twice	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Mult	7	advmod	_	_
7	telling	tell	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **need** | past · do-support | the man |  |  |  |  |  | vn want-32.1-1-1 «NP V S\_ING»: agent=Pivot clause=Theme |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* *not said to happen* | gerund | the man *not said here* |  |  |  |  | twice *property* | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V»: 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 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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