---
title: He was old, decrepit, dirty, and ragged! — The Orange Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: He was old, decrepit, dirty, and ragged! Who acts: King. A sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 3, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Orange Fairy Book, Opening, part 3, sentence 58

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He was old, decrepit, dirty, and ragged!

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**Who acts:** King · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» 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 (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:pg3027:159`): 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:pg3027:3:58
# text = He was old, decrepit, dirty, and ragged!
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	cop	_	_
3	old	old	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	_
5	decrepit	decrepit	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	conj	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
7	dirty	dirty	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	conj	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	ragged	ragged	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	conj	_	_
11	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | past | King |  |  |  |  | old *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **be** |  | King *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **be** |  | King *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 4 | **be** |  | King *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | 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:** «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3027 (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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