---
title: To tell the truth, it would make three reasonable ones.” — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: To tell the truth, it would make three reasonable ones.” Who acts: truth. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Blue Fairy Book, Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess, sentence 94

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
To tell the truth, it would make three reasonable ones.”

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**Who acts:** truth · **What happens:** tell, make · **To what, where:** truth, three reasonable ones · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (truth), 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:pg503:3:94
# text = To tell the truth, it would make three reasonable ones.”
1	To	to	PART	TO	_	2	mark	_	_
2	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	8	advcl	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	truth	truth	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
6	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
7	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	8	aux	_	_
8	make	make	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
9	three	three	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	11	nummod	_	_
10	reasonable	reasonable	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	ones	one	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | to-infinitive | truth *not said here* | the truth |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent truth=Recipient |
| 2 | **make** | would | truth | three reasonable ones |  |  |  |  | vn build-26.1-1 «NP.material V NP»: agent=Material one=Product |

<!-- .note -->
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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