---
title: But she said merely: “Explain yourself.” — The Brown Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: But she said merely: “Explain yourself.” Who acts: person. A sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 6, 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/pg3282/6/29/)

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# The Brown Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, part 6, sentence 29

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But she said merely: “Explain yourself.”

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**Who acts:** person · **What happens:** say, explain · **To what, where:** yourself · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Brown Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Brown Fairy Book, part 6. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (person), 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:pg3282:6:29
# text = But she said merely: “Explain yourself.”
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	3	cc	_	_
2	she	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	merely	merely	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	7	punct	_	_
6	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	Explain	explain	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	ccomp	_	_
8	yourself	yourself	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=2|PronType=Prs|Reflex=Yes	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | person |  |  |  |  | merely *property* | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **explain** *speech: assert* *in a quote* | infinitive |  | yourself |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent yourself=Topic |

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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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