---
title: Tell me a story, or it'll be the worse for you." — Celtic Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Tell me a story, or it'll be the worse for you." Who acts: you, story. A sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Andrew Coffey, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Celtic Fairy Tales, Andrew Coffey, sentence 23

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Tell me a story, or it'll be the worse for you."

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**Who acts:** you, story · **What happens:** tell, be · **To what, where:** story, me · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Andrew Coffey. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, story), 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:pg7885:27:23
# text = Tell me a story, or it'll be the worse for you."
1	Tell	tell	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	1	iobj	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	story	story	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
6	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
7	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	'll	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	11	aux	_	_
9	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	11	cop	_	_
10	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	worse	bad	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	1	conj	_	_
12	for	for	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
13	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	11	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | imperative | you *not said here* | a story | me |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP-Dative NP»: agent=Agent i=Recipient story=Topic |
| 2 | **is** | future | story |  |  |  |  | for you; bad *property* | tree rules |

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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:** «Celtic Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7885 (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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