---
title: ‘Oh, don’t tar and feather me, please! — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Oh, don’t tar and feather me, please! Who acts: 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/pg540/22/168/)

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Little Good Mouse, sentence 168

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‘Oh, don’t tar and feather me, please!

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** not tar · **To what, where:** feather

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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 (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:pg540:22:168
# text = ‘Oh, don’t tar and feather me, please!
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Oh	oh	INTJ	UH	_	6	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
4	do	do	AUX	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
6	tar	tar	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	feather	feather	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	_
9	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:unmarked	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
11	please	please	INTJ	UH	_	6	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **tar** | imperative · do-support | you *not said here* | feather  me |  |  |  |  | vn butter-9.9 «NP V NP.destination»: agent=Agent feather=Destination |

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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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