---
title: 'Ah, my father, how can I tell you! — The Orange Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: 'Ah, my father, how can I tell you! Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 14, 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/pg3027/14/1/)

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# The Orange Fairy Book, Opening, part 14, sentence 1

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'Ah, my father, how can I tell you!

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

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This is a sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 14. 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:pg3027:14:1
# text = 'Ah, my father, how can I tell you!
1	'	'	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Ah	ah	INTJ	UH	_	5	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
4	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	5	nmod:poss	_	_
5	father	father	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
7	how	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	10	advmod	_	_
8	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	10	aux	_	_
9	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
10	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	acl:relcl	_	_
11	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	10	iobj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | can | I |  | you |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent you=Recipient |

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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:** «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3027 (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: [Opening, part 13, 104](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg3027/13/104/)
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