---
title: “Pray, puss, give me my tail.” — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “Pray, puss, give me my tail.” Who acts: Pray. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Cat and the Mouse, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Cat and the Mouse, sentence 3

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“Pray, puss, give me my tail.”

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**Who acts:** Pray · **What happens:** give · **To what, where:** tail, me

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Cat and the Mouse. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Pray), 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:pg7439:40:3
# text = “Pray, puss, give me my tail.”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Pray	Pray	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	4	punct	_	_
4	puss	puss	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	appos	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
6	give	give	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	6	iobj	_	_
8	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	9	nmod:poss	_	_
9	tail	tail	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **give** *in a quote* | infinitive | Pray | my tail | me |  |  |  | vn give-13.1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent i=Recipient tail=Theme |

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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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