---
title: ‘A strange Queen to light the fires,’ thought the King. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘A strange Queen to light the fires,’ thought the King. Who acts: strange Queen. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Sigurd, 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/pg540/51/18/)

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Story of Sigurd, sentence 18

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‘A strange Queen to light the fires,’ thought the King.

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**Who acts:** strange Queen · **What happens:** light, think · **To what, where:** fires, King · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Sigurd. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (strange Queen), 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:pg540:51:18
# text = ‘A strange Queen to light the fires,’ thought the King.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	strange	strange	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	Queen	Queen	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
5	to	to	PART	TO	_	6	mark	_	_
6	light	light	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	11	ccomp	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	fires	fire	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
11	thought	think	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
12	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	King	King	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	11	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	11	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **light** | to-infinitive | a strange Queen | the fires |  |  |  |  | vn preparing-26.3-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent fire=Product |
| 2 | **think** *speech: other* | past |  | the King |  |  |  |  | vn consider-29.9-2 «NP V NP ADJ»: agent=Agent king=Attribute clause=Theme |

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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 Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 540 (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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