---
title: Tell me, O friend, if you can.” — The grateful elephant · tree and pragmatics
description: Tell me, O friend, if you can.” Who acts: you. A sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 16, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The grateful elephant, Opening, part 16, sentence 14

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Tell me, O friend, if you can.”

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

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This is a sentence of «The grateful elephant» by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Opening, part 16. 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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**Mova's own parse.** This tree may be wrong.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg74064:16:14
# text = Tell me, O friend, if you can.”
1	Tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	1	iobj	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	_
4	O	o	INTJ	UH	_	5	discourse	_	_
5	friend	friend	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	vocative	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
7	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	9	mark	_	_
8	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	9	nsubj	_	_
9	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	1	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | imperative | you *not said here* |  | me |  |  | friend *vocative* | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent i=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 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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