---
title: He sought a way out, but could find none. — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: He sought a way out, but could find none. Who acts: king. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Six Swans, 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/pg640/4/3/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Six Swans, sentence 3

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He sought a way out, but could find none.

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**Who acts:** king · **What happens:** seek out, find · **To what, where:** way, none

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Six Swans. 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:pg640:4:3
# text = He sought a way out, but could find none.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	sought	seek	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	way	way	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
5	out	out	ADV	RB	_	2	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
7	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
8	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	9	aux	_	_
9	find	find	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	conj	_	_
10	none	none	PRON	NN	PronType=Neg	9	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **seek out** | past | king | a way |  |  |  | out *property* | vn hunt-35.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent way=Theme |
| 2 | **find** | could | king *not said here* | none |  |  |  |  | vn discover-84 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent none=Topic |

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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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