---
title: ‘Even Mummy couldn’t mistake that for me being killed.’ — Just so stories · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Even Mummy couldn’t mistake that for me being killed.’ Who acts: Mummy. A sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, How the Alphabet Was Made, 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/pg2781/10/165/)

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# Just so stories, How the Alphabet Was Made, sentence 165

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‘Even Mummy couldn’t mistake that for me being killed.’

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**Who acts:** Mummy · **What happens:** not mistake, kill · **To what, where:** that, me

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This is a sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, How the Alphabet Was Made. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Mummy), 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:pg2781:10:165
# text = ‘Even Mummy couldn’t mistake that for me being killed.’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Even	even	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
3	Mummy	Mummy	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
4	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
6	mistake	mistake	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	that	that	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	6	obj	_	_
8	for	for	SCONJ	IN	_	11	mark	_	_
9	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj:pass	_	_
10	being	be	AUX	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	11	aux:pass	_	_
11	killed	kill	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	6	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **mistake** | could | Mummy | that |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **kill** | gerund · passive |  | me |  |  |  |  | vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: subject=Theme |

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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:** «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, Project Gutenberg book 2781 (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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