---
title: Don’t attempt to tell lies. — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Don’t attempt to tell lies. Who acts: you. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, How a Fish Swam in the Air and a Hare in the Water., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, How a Fish Swam in the Air and a Hare in the Water., sentence 89

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Don’t attempt to tell lies.

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** not attempt, not tell · **To what, where:** lies · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, How a Fish Swam in the Air and a Hare in the Water.. 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:pg641:16:89
# text = Don’t attempt to tell lies.
1	Do	do	AUX	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	3	advmod	_	_
3	attempt	attempt	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	to	to	PART	TO	_	5	mark	_	_
5	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	xcomp	_	_
6	lies	lie	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **attempt** | imperative · do-support | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn try-61.1 «NP V S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality |
| 2 | **not** **tell** *speech: assert* | to-infinitive | you *not said here* | lies |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent lie=Recipient |

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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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