---
title: But you must put your best foot foremost.’ — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: But you must put your best foot foremost.’ Who acts: you. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tinder-box, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Tinder-box, sentence 131

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But you must put your best foot foremost.’

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** put · **To what, where:** best foot

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tinder-box. 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.

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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:pg640:46:131
# text = But you must put your best foot foremost.’
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	_
2	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
3	must	must	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
4	put	put	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	your	your	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	7	nmod:poss	_	_
6	best	good	ADJ	JJS	Degree=Sup	7	amod	_	_
7	foot	foot	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
8	foremost	foremost	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **put** | must | you | your best foot |  |  |  | foremost *property* | vn invest-13.5.4-1 «NP V PP»: agent=Agent foot=Goal |

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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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