---
title: ‘I don’t know,’ answered the Prince. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘I don’t know,’ answered the Prince. Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg540/2/74/)

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, sentence 74

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‘I don’t know,’ answered the Prince.

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** not know, answer · **To what, where:** Prince · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Twelve Dancing Princesses. 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:pg540:2:74
# text = ‘I don’t know,’ answered the Prince.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
3	do	do	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	5	advmod	_	_
5	know	know	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	8	ccomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
8	answered	answer	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	Prince	Prince	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	8	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **know** | present · do-support | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer |
| 2 | **answer** *speech: assert* | past |  |  | the Prince |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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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