---
title: It was a dark evening, and he could not even buy a light. — The Yellow Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: It was a dark evening, and he could not even buy a light. Who acts: last, soldier. A sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tinder-box, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Yellow Fairy Book, The Tinder-box, sentence 83

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It was a dark evening, and he could not even buy a light.

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**Who acts:** last, soldier · **What happens:** be, not buy · **To what, where:** dark evening, light

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This is a sentence of «The Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Tinder-box. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (last, soldier), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg640:3322`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg640:46:83
# text = It was a dark evening, and he could not even buy a light.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	dark	dark	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	evening	evening	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
8	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
9	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
10	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	12	advmod	_	_
11	even	even	ADV	RB	_	12	advmod	_	_
12	buy	buy	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	conj	_	_
13	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
14	light	light	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	obj	_	_
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | past | last | a dark evening |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **not** **buy** | could | soldier | a light |  |  |  |  | vn accept-77.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent light=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 Yellow Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 640 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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