---
title: You cannot help us.’ — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: You cannot help us.’ Who acts: You. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Dragon and His Grandmother, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Dragon and His Grandmother, sentence 30

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You cannot help us.’

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**Who acts:** You · **What happens:** not help · **To what, where:** us

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Dragon and His Grandmother. 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:pg640:9:30
# text = You cannot help us.’
1	You	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
2	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	help	help	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	us	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **help** | can | You |  | us |  |  |  | vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent we=Beneficiary |

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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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