---
title: “Ask not, but eat,” replied Aladdin. — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: “Ask not, but eat,” replied Aladdin. Who acts: Aladdin. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Blue Fairy Book, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, sentence 56

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“Ask not, but eat,” replied Aladdin.

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**Who acts:** Aladdin · **What happens:** not ask, eat, reply · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Aladdin), 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:pg503:12:56
# text = “Ask not, but eat,” replied Aladdin.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Ask	ask	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	9	ccomp	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	2	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
5	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	eat	eat	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
9	replied	reply	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
10	Aladdin	Aladdin	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **ask** *speech: ask* *in a quote* | infinitive |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **eat** *in a quote* | infinitive |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **reply** *speech: assert* | past | Aladdin |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1 «NP V S-Quote»: agent=Agent clause=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 Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 503 (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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