---
title: [Told the writer by an Indian.] — The Brown Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: [Told the writer by an Indian.] A sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Story Of The King Who Would Be Stronger Than Fate, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Brown Fairy Book, Story Of The King Who Would Be Stronger Than Fate, sentence 193

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\[Told the writer by an Indian.\]

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**What happens:** tell · **To what, where:** writer · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Story Of The King Who Would Be Stronger Than Fate. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: 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:pg3282:33:193
# text = [Told the writer by an Indian.]
1	[	[	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Told	tell	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	0	root	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	writer	writer	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	iobj	_	_
5	by	by	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	an	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	Indian	Indian	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	]	]	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	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* | participle |  |  | the writer |  |  | by a Indian | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent writer=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 Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3282 (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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