---
title: There was once upon a time a poor miller who had a very beautiful da… — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: There was once upon a time a poor miller who had a very beautiful daughter. Who acts: poor miller. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/13/191/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [The Blue Fairy Book](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/) / [The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Lea…](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/13/) / 191

# The Blue Fairy Book, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, sentence 191

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
There was once upon a time a poor miller who had a very beautiful daughter.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** poor miller · **What happens:** be, have · **To what, where:** beautiful daughter

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (poor miller), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg503:13:191
# text = There was once upon a time a poor miller who had a very beautiful daughter.
1	There	there	PRON	EX	PronType=Dem	2	expl	_	_
2	was	be	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	once	once	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Mult	2	advmod	_	_
4	upon	upon	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	time	time	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	poor	poor	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	miller	miller	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	appos	_	_
10	who	who	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	11	nsubj	_	_
11	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	9	acl:relcl	_	_
12	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	15	det	_	_
13	very	very	ADV	RB	_	14	advmod	_	_
14	beautiful	beautiful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	15	amod	_	_
15	daughter	daughter	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **be** | past |  |  |  | there | time | once *property* | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **have** | past | a poor miller | a beautiful daughter |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent daughter=Patient |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**Text:** «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 503 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 190](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/13/190/)
- next →: [sentence 192](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/13/192/)
- ↑ back to [The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/13/)