---
title: ‘Sire, give me one of your prisoners. — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Sire, give me one of your prisoners. Who acts: Sire. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lute Player, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Lute Player, sentence 39

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‘Sire, give me one of your prisoners.

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**Who acts:** Sire · **What happens:** give · **To what, where:** one, me

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lute Player. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Sire), 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:pg641:8:39
# text = ‘Sire, give me one of your prisoners.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Sire	sire	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
4	give	give	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	iobj	_	_
6	one	one	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	4	obj	_	_
7	of	of	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
8	your	your	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	9	nmod:poss	_	_
9	prisoners	prisoner	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **give** | infinitive | Sire | one of your prisoners | me |  |  |  | vn give-13.1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent i=Recipient one=Theme |

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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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