---
title: ‘Never!’ they replied, holding out their hands. — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Never!’ they replied, holding out their hands. Who acts: children. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Glass Mountain(16), part 4, 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/pg640/25/5/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Glass Mountain(16), part 4, sentence 5

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‘Never!’ they replied, holding out their hands.

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**Who acts:** children · **What happens:** not reply, hold out · **To what, where:** hands

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Glass Mountain(16), part 4. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (children), 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:pg640:25:5
# text = ‘Never!’ they replied, holding out their hands.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	6	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
5	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
6	replied	reply	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
8	holding	hold	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	6	advcl	_	_
9	out	out	ADP	RP	_	8	compound:prt	_	_
10	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	11	nmod:poss	_	_
11	hands	hand	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obj	_	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** **reply** *speech: assert* | past | children *= child* |  |  |  |  |  | vn respond-113 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **hold out** | gerund | children *= child* *not said here* | children's hands |  |  |  |  | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent hand=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 Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 640 (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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