---
title: “Not unless you can keep her,” replied the father. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “Not unless you can keep her,” replied the father. Who acts: you, father. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Ass, the Table, and the Stick, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Ass, the Table, and the Stick, sentence 31

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“Not unless you can keep her,” replied the father.

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**Who acts:** you, father · **What happens:** not keep, reply · **To what, where:** master · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Ass, the Table, and the Stick. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, father), 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:pg7439:45:31
# text = “Not unless you can keep her,” replied the father.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
3	unless	unless	SCONJ	IN	_	6	mark	_	_
4	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
5	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
6	keep	keep	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	ccomp	_	_
7	her	she	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
10	replied	reply	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
11	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	father	father	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **keep** *a condition, not said to happen, in a quote* | can | you | master |  |  |  |  | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent she=Theme |
| 2 | **reply** *speech: assert* | past | the father |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1 «NP V S-Quote»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |

<!-- .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.

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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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