---
title: The nurse asked the boatman: — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: The nurse asked the boatman: Who acts: nurse. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Princess Rosette, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, Princess Rosette, sentence 113

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The nurse asked the boatman:

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**Who acts:** nurse · **What happens:** ask · **To what, where:** boatman

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Princess Rosette. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (nurse), 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:pg540:11:113
# text = The nurse asked the boatman:
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	nurse	nurse	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	asked	ask	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	boatman	boatman	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **ask** *speech: ask* | past | the nurse | the boatman |  |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent boatman=Recipient |

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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 Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 540 (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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