---
title: One can hide a baby, but you cannot hide a boy. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: One can hide a baby, but you cannot hide a boy. Who acts: One, you. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter V, 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/pg2892/18/40/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter V, sentence 40

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One can hide a baby, but you cannot hide a boy.

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**Who acts:** One, you · **What happens:** hide, not hide · **To what, where:** baby, boy

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter V. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (One, 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:pg2892:18:40
# text = One can hide a baby, but you cannot hide a boy.
1	One	one	PRON	PRP	Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	hide	hide	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	baby	baby	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
7	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
8	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	_
9	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	11	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	11	advmod	_	_
11	hide	hide	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	advcl	_	_
12	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	boy	boy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **hide** | can | One | a baby |  |  |  |  | vn concealment-16-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent baby=Patient |
| 2 | **not** **hide** | can | you | a boy |  |  |  |  | vn concealment-16-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent boy=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:** «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Project Gutenberg book 2892 (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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