---
title: But the king was always sad when a story was ended. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: But the king was always sad when a story was ended. Who acts: king. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Endless Tale., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/45/6/)

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Endless Tale., sentence 6

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But the king was always sad when a story was ended.

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**Who acts:** king · **What happens:** be, end · **To what, where:** story

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Endless Tale.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (king), 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:pg18442:1342`): 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:pg18442:45:6
# text = But the king was always sad when a story was ended.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	king	king	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
4	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
5	always	always	ADV	RB	PronType=Tot	6	advmod	_	_
6	sad	sad	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
7	when	when	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	11	advmod	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	story	story	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	nsubj:pass	_	_
10	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	11	aux:pass	_	_
11	ended	end	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	6	advcl	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | past | the king |  |  |  |  | always, sad *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **end** | past · passive |  | a story |  |  |  |  | vn stop-55.4-1-1 «NP V NP.eventuality»: subject=Eventuality |

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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:** «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 18442 (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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