---
title: But the merchant ordered him to come in. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: But the merchant ordered him to come in. Who acts: merchant. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Whittington and His Cat, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7439/37/89/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [English Fairy Tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7439/) / [Whittington and His Cat](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7439/37/) / 89

# English Fairy Tales, Whittington and His Cat, sentence 89

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
But the merchant ordered him to come in.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** merchant · **What happens:** order, come in · **To what, where:** King

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Whittington and His Cat. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (merchant), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg7439:37:89
# text = But the merchant ordered him to come in.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	merchant	merchant	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	ordered	order	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	obj	_	_
6	to	to	PART	TO	_	7	mark	_	_
7	come	come	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	xcomp	_	_
8	in	in	ADV	RB	_	7	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **order** | past | the merchant |  | King |  |  |  | vn order-58.3-1 «NP V NP S\_ING»: agent=Agent he=Recipient clause=Topic |
| 2 | **come in** *not said to happen* | to-infinitive | the merchant *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 88](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7439/37/88/)
- next →: [sentence 90](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7439/37/90/)
- ↑ back to [Whittington and His Cat](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7439/37/)