---
title: “Set me a task!” — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “Set me a task!” Who acts: you. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Master and His Pupil, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Master and His Pupil, sentence 20

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“Set me a task!”

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**Who acts:** you · **What happens:** set · **To what, where:** lad

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Master and His Pupil. 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:pg7439:18:20
# text = “Set me a task!”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Set	set	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	obj	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	task	task	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **set** *in a quote* | imperative | you *not said here* | the lad *= lad* |  |  |  |  | vn put-9.1-2 «NP V NP ADVP»: agent=Agent i=Theme task=Destination |

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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:** «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7439 (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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