---
title: “Tell me how I can serve you.” — The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North · tree and pragmatics
description: “Tell me how I can serve you.” Who acts: you, Ilmarinen. A sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Forging of the Sampo, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Forging of the Sampo, sentence 21

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“Tell me how I can serve you.”

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**Who acts:** you, Ilmarinen · **What happens:** tell, serve · **To what, where:** Ilmarinen, you · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Forging of the Sampo. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, Ilmarinen), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Mova's own parse.** This tree may be wrong.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg66819:11:21
# text = “Tell me how I can serve you.”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	iobj	_	_
4	how	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	7	advmod	_	_
5	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
6	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
7	serve	serve	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	advcl	_	_
8	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	7	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* *in a quote* | imperative | you *not said here* |  | Ilmarinen |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=Recipient |
| 2 | **serve** *in a quote* | can | Ilmarinen | you |  |  |  |  | vn masquerade-29.6-2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent you=Attribute |

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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 Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 66819 (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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