---
title: May I inquire what the business is?” — The Lilac Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: May I inquire what the business is?” Who acts: I, business. A sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac 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/pg3454/6/4/)

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# The Lilac Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 6, sentence 4

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May I inquire what the business is?”

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**Who acts:** I, business · **What happens:** inquire, be

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This is a sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac 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 (I, business), 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:pg3454:6:4
# text = May I inquire what the business is?”
1	May	may	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	inquire	inquire	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	3	obj	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	business	business	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
7	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	cop	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **inquire** *speech: other* | may | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **is a** | present | the business |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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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