---
title: ‘Well, open the portal, I say.’ — The Lilac Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Well, open the portal, I say.’ Who acts: you, I. A sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 38, 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/pg3454/38/45/)

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# The Lilac Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 38, sentence 45

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‘Well, open the portal, I say.’

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

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This is a sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 38. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, 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:pg3454:38:45
# text = ‘Well, open the portal, I say.’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Well	well	INTJ	UH	_	4	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
4	open	open	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	portal	portal	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
8	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	9	nsubj	_	_
9	say	say	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	parataxis	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **open** | imperative | you *not said here* | the portal |  |  |  |  | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6-1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location portal=Theme |
| 2 | **say** *speech: assert* | present | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent |

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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 Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3454 (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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