---
title: To find out, he took his knife, and with a little trouble he opened… — The Arabian Nights Entertainments · tree and pragmatics
description: To find out, he took his knife, and with a little trouble he opened it. Who acts: sire. A sentence of «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 3, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Arabian Nights Entertainments, Opening, part 3, sentence 78

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To find out, he took his knife, and with a little trouble he opened it.

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**Who acts:** sire · **What happens:** find out, take, open · **To what, where:** knife

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This is a sentence of «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (sire), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg128:266`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg128:3:78
# text = To find out, he took his knife, and with a little trouble he opened it.
1	To	to	PART	TO	_	2	mark	_	_
2	find	find	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	advcl	_	_
3	out	out	ADP	RP	_	2	compound:prt	_	_
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
5	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
6	took	take	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	knife	knife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	_
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	16	punct	_	_
10	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	16	cc	_	_
11	with	with	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
12	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
13	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	14	amod	_	_
14	trouble	trouble	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	16	obl	_	_
15	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	16	nsubj	_	_
16	opened	open	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	conj	_	_
17	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	16	obj	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **find out** | to-infinitive | sire *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn learn-14-2-1 «NP V PP.topic»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **take** | past | sire | sire's knife |  |  |  |  | vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent knife=Theme |
| 3 | **open** | past | sire | knife |  |  |  | with a little trouble | vn establish-55.5-1 «NP V NP PP.instrument»: agent=Agent it=Patient with trouble=Instrument |

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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:** «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 128 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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