---
title: They must mean to kill us.’ — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: They must mean to kill us.’ Who acts: soldiers. 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 189

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They must mean to kill us.’

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**Who acts:** soldiers · **What happens:** mean, kill · **To what, where:** us

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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 (soldiers), 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:pg540:11:189
# text = They must mean to kill us.’
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	must	must	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	mean	mean	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	to	to	PART	TO	_	5	mark	_	_
5	kill	kill	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	xcomp	_	_
6	us	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	5	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | must | soldiers *= soldier* |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **kill** *not said to happen* | to-infinitive | soldiers *= soldier* *not said here* | us |  |  |  |  | vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent we=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 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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