---
title: Pray, tell me a story." — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: Pray, tell me a story." Who acts: you. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Little Elder-tree Mother, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Elder-tree Mother, sentence 19

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Pray, tell me a story."

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

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, The Little Elder-tree Mother. 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:pg27200:72:19
# text = Pray, tell me a story."
1	Pray	pray	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	3	punct	_	_
3	tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	1	conj	_	_
4	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	iobj	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	story	story	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	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 |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | infinitive | you *not said here* | a story | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent i=Recipient story=Topic |

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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:** «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Project Gutenberg book 27200 (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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