---
title: Listen, I will tell you a story. — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: Listen, I will tell you a story. Who acts: you, I. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Fifth Evening, 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/pg27200/96/16/)

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Fifth Evening, sentence 16

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Listen, I will tell you a story.

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

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Fifth Evening. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, I), 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:pg27200:96:16
# text = Listen, I will tell you a story.
1	Listen	listen	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	_
3	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
4	will	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
5	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	1	conj	_	_
6	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	5	iobj	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	story	story	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **listen** | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn peer-30.3 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | future | I | a story | you |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent you=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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