---
title: He stooped to catch it, but it swirled past him. — The Orange Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: He stooped to catch it, but it swirled past him. Who acts: river, pack. A sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 34, 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/pg3027/34/103/)

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# The Orange Fairy Book, Opening, part 34, sentence 103

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He stooped to catch it, but it swirled past him.

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**Who acts:** river, pack · **What happens:** stoop, catch, swirl · **To what, where:** pack

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This is a sentence of «The Orange Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 34. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (river, pack), 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:pg3027:2215`): 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:pg3027:34:103
# text = He stooped to catch it, but it swirled past him.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	stooped	stoop	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	to	to	PART	TO	_	4	mark	_	_
4	catch	catch	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	advcl	_	_
5	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	obj	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
7	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
8	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	9	nsubj	_	_
9	swirled	swirl	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
10	past	past	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	9	obl	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **stoop** | past | river |  |  |  |  |  | vn assuming\_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **catch** | to-infinitive | river *not said here* | pack |  |  |  |  | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Theme |
| 3 | **swirl** | past | pack |  |  |  |  | past river | vn coil-9.6 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme past he=Destination |

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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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