---
title: “I told you a lie.” — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “I told you a lie.” Who acts: hearted man. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter X, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/23/58/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [Irish Fairy Tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/) / [Chapter X](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/23/) / 58

# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter X, sentence 58

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
“I told you a lie.”

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** hearted man · **What happens:** tell · **To what, where:** lie, you · **Speech:** someone speaks here

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter X. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (hearted man), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg2892:23:58
# text = “I told you a lie.”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	told	tell	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	3	iobj	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	lie	lie	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* *in a quote* | past | the hearted man *= man* | a lie | you |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent you=Recipient lie=Topic |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 57](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/23/57/)
- next →: [sentence 59](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/23/59/)
- ↑ back to [Chapter X](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/23/)