---
title: 'Catch me the green duck that floats on the water.' — The Orange Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: 'Catch me the green duck that floats on the water.' Who acts: you, green duck. A sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 31, 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/pg3027/31/37/)

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# The Orange Fairy Book, Opening, part 31, sentence 37

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'Catch me the green duck that floats on the water.'

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**Who acts:** you, green duck · **What happens:** catch, float · **To what, where:** green duck, me, water

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This is a sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 31. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, green duck), 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:pg3027:31:37
# text = 'Catch me the green duck that floats on the water.'
1	'	'	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	Catch	catch	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	me	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	obj	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	green	green	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	duck	duck	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
7	that	that	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	8	nsubj	_	_
8	floats	float	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	acl:relcl	_	_
9	on	on	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
10	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	water	water	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	'	'	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **catch** | imperative | you *not said here* | the green duck | me |  |  |  | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP.beneficiary NP»: agent=Agent i=Beneficiary duck=Theme |
| 2 | **float** | present | the green duck |  |  | the water |  |  | vn run-51.3.2-2 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme on water=Trajectory |

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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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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