---
title: But I must tell you I engage my labourers without wages. — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: But I must tell you I engage my labourers without wages. Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Magic Ring, 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/pg640/33/42/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Magic Ring, sentence 42

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But I must tell you I engage my labourers without wages.

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** tell, engage · **To what, where:** you, labourers · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Magic Ring. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), 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:pg640:33:42
# text = But I must tell you I engage my labourers without wages.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	_
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
3	must	must	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
4	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	4	iobj	_	_
6	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
7	engage	engage	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	ccomp	_	_
8	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	9	nmod:poss	_	_
9	labourers	labourer	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	obj	_	_
10	without	without	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	wages	wage	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | must | I |  | you |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP S\_INF»: agent=Agent you=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 2 | **engage** | present | I | my labourers |  |  |  | without wages | vn amalgamate-22.2-3-2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent labourer=Patient |

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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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