---
title: Let us see who this creature was. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Let us see who this creature was. Who acts: you, us, creature. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Canary, 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/pg540/40/166/)

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Enchanted Canary, sentence 166

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Let us see who this creature was.

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**Who acts:** you, us, creature · **What happens:** let, see, be · **To what, where:** us · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Canary. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, us, creature), 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:pg540:40:166
# text = Let us see who this creature was.
1	Let	let	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	us	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	1	obj	_	_
3	see	see	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	1	xcomp	_	_
4	who	who	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	3	ccomp	_	_
5	this	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	6	det	_	_
6	creature	creature	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
7	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	cop	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **let** | imperative | you *not said here* | us |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **see** | infinitive | us *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer |
| 3 | **is a** | past | this creature |  |  |  |  |  | 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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