---
title: But tell me, is it a civilized country?” — The Wonderful Wizard of Oz · tree and pragmatics
description: But tell me, is it a civilized country?” Who acts: you, house. A sentence of «The Wonderful Wizard of Oz» by L. Frank Baum, Chapter II. The Council with the Munchkins, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chapter II. The Council with the Munchkins, sentence 65

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But tell me, is it a civilized country?”

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**Who acts:** you, house · **What happens:** tell, be · **To what, where:** me, civilized country · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Wonderful Wizard of Oz» by L. Frank Baum, Chapter II. The Council with the Munchkins. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, house), 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:pg55:3:65
# text = But tell me, is it a civilized country?”
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	2	cc	_	_
2	tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	iobj	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	cop	_	_
6	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	9	nsubj	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	civilized	civilized	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	country	country	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | imperative | you *not said here* |  | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient |
| 2 | **is a** | present | house | a civilized country |  |  |  |  | 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 Wonderful Wizard of Oz» by L. Frank Baum, Project Gutenberg book 55 (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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