---
title: His enemies at once went to the King and said: — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: His enemies at once went to the King and said: Who acts: enemies. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Pretty Goldilocks, 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/pg503/28/17/)

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# The Blue Fairy Book, The Story of Pretty Goldilocks, sentence 17

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His enemies at once went to the King and said:

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**Who acts:** enemies · **What happens:** go, say · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Pretty Goldilocks. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (enemies), 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:pg503:28:17
# text = His enemies at once went to the King and said:
1	His	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	2	nmod:poss	_	_
2	enemies	enemy	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	nsubj	_	_
3	at	at	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
4	once	once	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Mult	5	obl	_	_
5	went	go	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	to	to	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	King	King	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **go** | past | king's enemies |  |  |  |  | to the King | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V PP.initial\_location»: agent=Theme to king=Initial\_Location |
| 2 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | king's enemies *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | 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 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.

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