---
title: Wait a minute: I must first cut them off.” — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Wait a minute: I must first cut them off.” 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 98

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Wait a minute: I must first cut them off.”

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**Who acts:** you, I · **What happens:** wait, cut off · **To what, where:** nails

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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:pg503:13:98
# text = Wait a minute: I must first cut them off.”
1	Wait	wait	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	minute	minute	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	8	punct	_	_
5	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
6	must	must	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	8	aux	_	_
7	first	first	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Ord	8	advmod	_	_
8	cut	cut	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	1	advcl	_	_
9	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	obj	_	_
10	off	off	ADP	RP	_	8	compound:prt	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **wait** | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  | minute |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **cut off** | must | I | nails *= nail* |  |  |  | first *property* | vn stop-55.4-1 «NP V NP.eventuality»: agent=Affector they=Eventuality |

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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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