---
title: ‘I prefer him to all those beautiful animals.’ — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘I prefer him to all those beautiful animals.’ Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Nine Pea-hens and the Golden Apples, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Nine Pea-hens and the Golden Apples, sentence 146

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‘I prefer him to all those beautiful animals.’

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** prefer · **To what, where:** prince

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Nine Pea-hens and the Golden Apples. 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:pg641:7:146
# text = ‘I prefer him to all those beautiful animals.’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
3	prefer	prefer	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	obj	_	_
5	to	to	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
6	all	all	DET	PDT	PronType=Tot	9	det:predet	_	_
7	those	that	DET	DT	Number=Plur|PronType=Dem	9	det	_	_
8	beautiful	beautiful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	animals	animal	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	’	'	SYM	NFP	_	3	discourse	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **prefer** | present | I | prince |  |  |  | to all beautiful animals | vn admire-31.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer he=Stimulus |

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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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