---
title: Speak if you are an honest fellow, or I’ll knock you down the stairs.” — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Speak if you are an honest fellow, or I’ll knock you down the stairs.” Who acts: you, I. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Blue Fairy Book, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, sentence 25

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Speak if you are an honest fellow, or I’ll knock you down the stairs.”

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**Who acts:** you, I · **What happens:** speak, be, knock down · **To what, where:** honest fellow, you · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was. 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:pg503:13:25
# text = Speak if you are an honest fellow, or I’ll knock you down the stairs.”
1	Speak	speak	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	7	mark	_	_
3	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
4	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=2|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
5	an	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
6	honest	honest	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	fellow	fellow	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
9	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
10	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	’ll	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
12	knock	knock	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	1	conj	_	_
13	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	12	obj	_	_
14	down	down	ADP	RP	_	12	compound:prt	_	_
15	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
16	stairs	stair	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	12	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
18	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **speak** *speech: other* | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn talk-37.5 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **is a** *a condition, not said to happen* | present | you | a honest fellow |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **knock down** | future | I | you |  |  |  | the stairs *obl* | vn split-23.2 «NP V NP apart»: agent=Agent you=Patient |

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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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