---
title: Listen to that White Duck.’ — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Listen to that White Duck.’ Who acts: you. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The White Duck, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/29/51/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [The Yellow Fairy Book](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/) / [The White Duck](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/29/) / 51

# The Yellow Fairy Book, The White Duck, sentence 51

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Listen to that White Duck.’

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** listen · **To what, where:** White Duck

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The White Duck. 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.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg640:29:51
# text = Listen to that White Duck.’
1	Listen	listen	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	to	to	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
3	that	that	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	5	nsubj	_	_
4	White	White	ADJ	NNP	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	Duck	Duck	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	1	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **listen** | imperative | you *not said here* |  | White Duck |  |  |  | vn peer-30.3 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent to duck=Theme |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 50](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/29/50/)
- next →: [sentence 52](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/29/52/)
- ↑ back to [The White Duck](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/29/)