---
title: Once upon a time a great and powerful King married a lovely Princess. — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Once upon a time a great and powerful King married a lovely Princess. Who acts: great King. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The White Duck, 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/pg640/29/1/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The White Duck, sentence 1

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Once upon a time a great and powerful King married a lovely Princess.

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**Who acts:** great King · **What happens:** marry · **To what, where:** lovely Princess

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The White Duck. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (great 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:pg640:29:1
# text = Once upon a time a great and powerful King married a lovely Princess.
1	Once	once	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Mult	10	advmod	_	_
2	upon	upon	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	time	time	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obl	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
6	great	great	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	powerful	powerful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	conj	_	_
9	King	King	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
10	married	marry	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
11	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
12	lovely	lovely	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	amod	_	_
13	Princess	princess	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **marry** | past | a great King | a lovely Princess |  |  | time | once *property* | vn amalgamate-22.2-3-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent princess=Patient |

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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 Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 640 (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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- ← previous: [In the Land of Souls (21), 41](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/28/41/)
- next →: [sentence 2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg640/29/2/)
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