---
title: The king could hardly speak from alarm, but at last he said: — The Lilac Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: The king could hardly speak from alarm, but at last he said: Who acts: king. A sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 4, 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/pg3454/4/66/)

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# The Lilac Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 4, sentence 66

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The king could hardly speak from alarm, but at last he said:

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**Who acts:** king · **What happens:** speak, say · **To what, where:** alarm, last · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lilac Fairy Book, part 4. 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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**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:pg3454:4:66
# text = The king could hardly speak from alarm, but at last he said:
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	king	king	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
3	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	hardly	hardly	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
5	speak	speak	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
6	from	from	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
7	alarm	alarm	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	13	punct	_	_
9	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	13	cc	_	_
10	at	at	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	last	last	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	obl	_	_
12	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	13	nsubj	_	_
13	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	13	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **speak** *speech: other* | could | the king |  |  | alarm |  | hardly *property* | vn talk-37.5 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | king |  |  | last |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent |

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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 Lilac Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 3454 (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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