---
title: How can we trust him on our journey? — The grateful elephant · tree and pragmatics
description: How can we trust him on our journey? Who acts: we, our. A sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 14, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The grateful elephant, Opening, part 14, sentence 132

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How can we trust him on our journey?

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**Who acts:** we, our · **What happens:** trust, journey · **To what, where:** man, journey

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This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 14. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (we, our), 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:pg74064:14:140
# text = How can we trust him on our journey?
1	How	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	4	advmod	_	_
2	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	we	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
4	trust	trust	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	obj	_	_
6	on	on	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
7	our	our	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	journey	journey	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **trust** | can | we | man |  | our journey |  |  | vn conjecture-29.5-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent he=Theme |
| 2 | **journey** |  | our |  |  |  |  |  | nom journey «act transitive»: poss=agent |

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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 grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Project Gutenberg book 74064 (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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