---
title: ‘But I can’t draw, Daddy.’ — Just so stories · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘But I can’t draw, Daddy.’ Who acts: I. 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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# Just so stories, How the Alphabet Was Made, sentence 40

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‘But I can’t draw, Daddy.’

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** not draw · **To what, where:** Daddy

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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 (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:pg2781:10:40
# text = ‘But I can’t draw, Daddy.’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
3	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
4	ca	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
6	draw	draw	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
8	Daddy	Daddy	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **draw** | can | I | Daddy |  |  |  |  | vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent daddy=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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