---
title: If someone would but tell me!’ — Grimms' Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: If someone would but tell me!’ Who acts: someone. A sentence of «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Grimms' Fairy Tales, The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was, sentence 136

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If someone would but tell me!’

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

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This is a sentence of «Grimms' Fairy Tales» by Jacob Grimm, The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (someone), 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:pg2591:57:136
# text = If someone would but tell me!’
1	If	if	SCONJ	IN	_	5	mark	_	_
2	someone	someone	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	5	nsubj	_	_
3	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
5	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
6	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	5	iobj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	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 | **tell** *speech: assert* | would | someone |  | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient |

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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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