---
title: ‘Pray tell me what you are looking for here?’ — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Pray tell me what you are looking for here?’ Who acts: Pray, you. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Little Good Mouse, 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/pg540/22/159/)

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Little Good Mouse, sentence 159

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‘Pray tell me what you are looking for here?’

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**Who acts:** Pray, you · **What happens:** tell, look · **To what, where:** me · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Little Good Mouse. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Pray, 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:pg540:22:159
# text = ‘Pray tell me what you are looking for here?’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Pray	Pray	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	iobj	_	_
5	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	8	obl	_	_
6	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
7	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=2|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	8	aux	_	_
8	looking	look	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	3	obl	_	_
9	for	for	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
10	here	here	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	8	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | infinitive | Pray |  | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient |
| 2 | **look** | present · progressive | you |  |  |  |  |  | vn rummage-35.5 «NP V PP.location PP.theme»: agent=Agent for here=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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