---
title: Pray tell me if you know.’ — Grimms' Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Pray tell me if you know.’ Who acts: you. A sentence of «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, The Water of Life, 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/pg2591/49/28/)

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# Grimms' Fairy Tales, The Water of Life, sentence 28

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Pray tell me if you know.’

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** pray, tell, know · **To what, where:** me · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, The Water of Life. 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:pg2591:49:28
# text = Pray tell me if you know.’
1	Pray	pray	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	1	xcomp	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	iobj	_	_
4	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	6	mark	_	_
5	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
6	know	know	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=2|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **pray** | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn long-32.2 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Pivot clause=Theme |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | infinitive | you *not said here* |  | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient |
| 3 | **know** *a condition, not said to happen* | present | you |  |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer |

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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:** «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, Project Gutenberg book 2591 (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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