---
title: I dare not tell you. — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: I dare not tell you. Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Golden Lads, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7277/49/24/)

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# The Green Fairy Book, The Golden Lads, sentence 24

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I dare not tell you.

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** not dare, not tell · **To what, where:** you · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Golden Lads. 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:pg7277:49:24
# text = I dare not tell you.
1	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	dare	dare	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	2	advmod	_	_
4	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	xcomp	_	_
5	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	4	iobj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **dare** | present | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn urge-58.1-1 «NP V NP S\_ING»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **not** **tell** *speech: assert* | infinitive | I *not said here* |  | you |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent you=Recipient |

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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 Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 7277 (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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