---
title: I may not tell you anything.” — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: I may not tell you anything.” Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The White Cat, part 2, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Blue Fairy Book, The White Cat, part 2, sentence 8

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I may not tell you anything.”

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** not tell · **To what, where:** anything, you · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The White Cat, part 2. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (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:pg503:24:8
# text = I may not tell you anything.”
1	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
2	may	may	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	4	iobj	_	_
6	anything	anything	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **tell** *speech: assert* | may | I | anything | you |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent you=Recipient anything=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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