---
title: ‘Could I grind something here?’ — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Could I grind something here?’ Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Finest Liar in the World, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Finest Liar in the World, sentence 5

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‘Could I grind something here?’

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** grind · **To what, where:** something

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Finest Liar in the World. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (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:pg641:3:5
# text = ‘Could I grind something here?’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
4	grind	grind	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	something	something	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	4	obj	_	_
6	here	here	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	4	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **grind** | could | I | something |  | here |  |  | vn carve-21.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent something=Patient |

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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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