---
title: Eve may have told these tales to amuse Cain and Abel. — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Eve may have told these tales to amuse Cain and Abel. Who acts: Eve, tales. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Violet Fairy Book, 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/pg641/1/15/)

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Violet Fairy Book, sentence 15

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Eve may have told these tales to amuse Cain and Abel.

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**Who acts:** Eve, tales · **What happens:** tell, amuse · **To what, where:** tales, Cain · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Violet Fairy Book. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Eve, tales), 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:pg641:1:15
# text = Eve may have told these tales to amuse Cain and Abel.
1	Eve	Eve	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
2	may	may	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	have	have	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	aux	_	_
4	told	tell	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
5	these	this	DET	DT	Number=Plur|PronType=Dem	6	det	_	_
6	tales	tale	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	_
7	to	to	PART	TO	_	8	mark	_	_
8	amuse	amuse	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	xcomp	_	_
9	Cain	Cain	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	8	obj	_	_
10	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
11	Abel	Abel	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	9	conj	_	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* | may · perfect | Eve | this tales |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP S\_INF»: agent=Agent tale=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 2 | **amuse** *not said to happen* | to-infinitive | this tales *not said here* | Cain and Abel |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus cain=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 Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 641 (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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