---
title: Nobody will dare to beat you if I tell them not. — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Nobody will dare to beat you if I tell them not. Who acts: Nobody, I. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, A Tale of the Tontlawald, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, A Tale of the Tontlawald, sentence 28

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Nobody will dare to beat you if I tell them not.

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**Who acts:** Nobody, I · **What happens:** dare, beat, not tell · **To what, where:** you, strawberries · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, A Tale of the Tontlawald. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Nobody, I), 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:pg641:2:28
# text = Nobody will dare to beat you if I tell them not.
1	Nobody	nobody	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Neg	3	nsubj	_	_
2	will	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	dare	dare	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	to	to	PART	TO	_	5	mark	_	_
5	beat	beat	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	xcomp	_	_
6	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	5	obj	_	_
7	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	9	mark	_	_
8	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	9	nsubj	_	_
9	tell	tell	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	3	advcl	_	_
10	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	9	iobj	_	_
11	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	9	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **dare** | future | Nobody |  |  |  |  |  | vn urge-58.1-1 «NP V NP S\_ING»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **beat** | to-infinitive | Nobody *not said here* | you |  |  |  |  | vn sound\_emission-43.2 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location you=Theme |
| 3 | **not** **tell** *speech: assert* *a condition, not said to happen* | present | I |  | strawberries *= strawberry* |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent they=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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