---
title: “Tell me why you have chosen a green dress.” — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: “Tell me why you have chosen a green dress.” Who acts: you. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Wonderful Sheep, part 1, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Blue Fairy Book, The Wonderful Sheep, part 1, sentence 9

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“Tell me why you have chosen a green dress.”

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** tell, choose · **To what, where:** me, green dress · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Wonderful Sheep, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you), 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:pg503:30:9
# text = “Tell me why you have chosen a green dress.”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	iobj	_	_
4	why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	7	advmod	_	_
5	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
6	have	have	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=2|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
7	chosen	choose	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	2	ccomp	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
9	green	green	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	dress	dress	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* *in a quote* | imperative | you *not said here* |  | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP what S»: agent=Agent i=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 2 | **choose** *in a quote* | present · perfect | you | a green dress |  |  |  |  | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent dress=Theme |

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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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