---
title: Tell me why my little brothers and sisters are all unlike me.” — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: Tell me why my little brothers and sisters are all unlike me.” Who acts: you, little brothers. A sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, The Toad and the Boy, 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/pg338/12/84/)

<!-- 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/) / [Old Indian Legends](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg338/) / [The Toad and the Boy](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg338/12/) / 84

# Old Indian Legends, The Toad and the Boy, sentence 84

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Tell me why my little brothers and sisters are all unlike me.”

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** you, little brothers · **What happens:** tell, be · **To what, where:** me · **Speech:** someone speaks here

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, The Toad and the Boy. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, little brothers), 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:pg338:12:84
# text = Tell me why my little brothers and sisters are all unlike me.”
1	Tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	1	iobj	_	_
3	why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	12	advmod	_	_
4	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
5	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	brothers	brother	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	12	nsubj	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	sisters	sister	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	conj	_	_
9	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	cop	_	_
10	all	all	ADV	RB	_	12	advmod	_	_
11	unlike	unlike	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
12	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	1	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | imperative | you *not said here* |  | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient |
| 2 | **is** | present | my little brothers and sisters |  |  |  |  | unlike me; all *property* | tree rules |

<!-- .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:** «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Project Gutenberg book 338 (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 83](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg338/12/83/)
- next →: [sentence 85](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg338/12/85/)
- ↑ back to [The Toad and the Boy](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg338/12/)