---
title: They should hear it sing, commanded the Emperor. — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: They should hear it sing, commanded the Emperor. Who acts: people, permission. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Nightingale, 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/pg640/48/122/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Nightingale, sentence 122

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They should hear it sing, commanded the Emperor.

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**Who acts:** people, permission · **What happens:** hear, sing, command · **To what, where:** permission, Emperor · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Nightingale. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (people, permission), 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:pg640:48:122
# text = They should hear it sing, commanded the Emperor.
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	should	should	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	hear	hear	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	obj	_	_
5	sing	sing	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
7	commanded	command	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	Emperor	Emperor	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **hear** | should | people | permission |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **sing** *speech: express* | infinitive | permission *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn sound\_emission-43.2 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 3 | **command** | past | people *not said here* | the Emperor |  |  |  |  | vn supervision-95.2.2-1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent emperor=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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