---
title: ‘I assure you I am rowing as hard as I can.’ — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘I assure you I am rowing as hard as I can.’ 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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# The Red Fairy Book, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, sentence 75

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‘I assure you I am rowing as hard as I can.’

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** assure, row · **To what, where:** you

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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:pg540:2:75
# text = ‘I assure you I am rowing as hard as I can.’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	assure	assure	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	3	iobj	_	_
5	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
6	am	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
7	rowing	row	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	3	ccomp	_	_
8	as	as	ADV	RB	_	9	advmod	_	_
9	hard	hard	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	7	advmod	_	_
10	as	as	SCONJ	IN	_	12	mark	_	_
11	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
12	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	9	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **assure** | present | I |  | you |  |  |  | vn advise-37.9 «NP V NP.recipient that S»: agent=Agent you=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 2 | **row** | present · progressive | I |  |  |  |  | hard *property* | vn nonvehicle-51.4.2 «NP.agent V»: agent=Agent |

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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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