---
title: “No, not a bit, nor a drop, unless it would choke you.” — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: “No, not a bit, nor a drop, unless it would choke you.” Who acts: drop. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Three Heads of the Well, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Three Heads of the Well, sentence 43

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“No, not a bit, nor a drop, unless it would choke you.”

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**Who acts:** drop · **What happens:** choke · **To what, where:** you

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Three Heads of the Well. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (drop), 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:pg7439:49:43
# text = “No, not a bit, nor a drop, unless it would choke you.”
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	No	no	INTJ	UH	Polarity=Neg	6	discourse	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
4	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	bit	bit	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
8	nor	nor	CCONJ	CC	Polarity=Neg	10	cc	_	_
9	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	drop	drop	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	15	punct	_	_
12	unless	unless	SCONJ	IN	_	15	mark	_	_
13	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	15	nsubj	_	_
14	would	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	15	aux	_	_
15	choke	choke	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	advcl	_	_
16	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	15	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
18	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **choke** *in a quote* | would | drop |  | you |  |  |  | vn fill-9.8 «NP V NP»: agent=Theme you=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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