---
title: What a hurry he was in, to be sure! — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: What a hurry he was in, to be sure! Who acts: Emperor, hurry. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Swineherd, 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/pg640/43/96/)

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Swineherd, sentence 96

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What a hurry he was in, to be sure!

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**Who acts:** Emperor, hurry · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** hurry

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Swineherd. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Emperor, hurry), 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:pg640:43:96
# text = What a hurry he was in, to be sure!
1	What	what	DET	WDT	PronType=Int	3	det	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	hurry	hurry	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
4	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
5	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
6	in	in	ADV	RB	_	3	acl:relcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
8	to	to	PART	TO	_	10	mark	_	_
9	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	cop	_	_
10	sure	sure	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	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 | **is** | past | Emperor | what hurry *not said here* |  |  |  | in *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **is** | to-infinitive | what hurry |  |  |  |  | sure *property* | tree rules |

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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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