---
title: Will you tell me what it means?’ — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Will you tell me what it means?’ Who acts: you, dream. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars, sentence 122

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Will you tell me what it means?’

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**Who acts:** you, dream · **What happens:** tell, mean · **To what, where:** me · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, dream), 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:pg641:4:122
# text = Will you tell me what it means?’
1	Will	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
2	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	iobj	_	_
5	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	7	obj	_	_
6	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
7	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	3	ccomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | future | you |  | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP what S»: agent=Agent i=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 2 | **mean** | present | dream |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Topic |

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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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