---
title: “Tell him it was all a mistake. — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “Tell him it was all a mistake. Who acts: Tibraide, room. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter XVII, 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/pg2892/88/35/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter XVII, sentence 35

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“Tell him it was all a mistake.

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**Who acts:** Tibraide, room · **What happens:** tell, be · **To what, where:** Tibraide, mistake · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter XVII. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Tibraide, room), 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:pg2892:88:35
# text = “Tell him it was all a mistake.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	iobj	_	_
4	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
5	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	8	cop	_	_
6	all	all	DET	PDT	PronType=Tot	8	det:predet	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	mistake	mistake	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	ccomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* *in a quote* | imperative | Tibraide *not said here* |  | Tibraide |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent he=Recipient |
| 2 | **is a** *in a quote* | past | room | all mistake |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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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- ← previous: [sentence 34](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/88/34/)
- next →: [sentence 36](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/88/36/)
- ↑ back to [Chapter XVII](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2892/88/)