---
title: Only sit still and don’t stir. — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Only sit still and don’t stir. 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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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/9/42/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Dragon and His Grandmother, sentence 42

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Only sit still and don’t stir.

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** sit, not stir

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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:pg640:9:42
# text = Only sit still and don’t stir.
1	Only	only	ADV	RB	_	2	advmod	_	_
2	sit	sit	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	still	still	ADV	RB	_	2	advmod	_	_
4	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	7	cc	_	_
5	do	do	AUX	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	7	advmod	_	_
7	stir	stir	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **sit** | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  | still |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **not** **stir** | infinitive · do-support | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer |

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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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