---
title: ‘Spare the father of a family!’ — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘Spare the father of a family!’ Who acts: you. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Watch, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Green Fairy Book, The Enchanted Watch, sentence 89

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‘Spare the father of a family!’

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** spare · **To what, where:** father

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Watch. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you), 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:pg7277:8:89
# text = ‘Spare the father of a family!’
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Spare	spare	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	father	father	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
5	of	of	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	family	family	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **spare** | imperative | you *not said here* | the father of a family |  |  |  |  | vn bill-54.5 «NP V NP NP.asset»: agent=Agent father=Asset |

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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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