---
title: Will you please tell me what you have for dinner?’ — Just so stories · tree and pragmatics
description: Will you please tell me what you have for dinner?’ Who acts: you. A sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, The Elephant’s Child, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Just so stories, The Elephant’s Child, sentence 40

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Will you please tell me what you have for dinner?’

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

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This is a sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, The Elephant’s Child. 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:pg2781:6:40
# text = Will you please tell me what you have for dinner?’
1	Will	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
2	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
3	please	please	INTJ	UH	_	4	discourse	_	_
4	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	iobj	_	_
6	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	8	obj	_	_
7	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
8	have	have	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=2|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	ccomp	_	_
9	for	for	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
10	dinner	dinner	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | future | you |  | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP what S»: agent=Agent i=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 2 | **have** | present | you |  |  |  |  | for dinner | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Patient |

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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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