---
title: So the king turned his steps homewards and told his wife. — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: So the king turned his steps homewards and told his wife. Who acts: king. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Prince Who Wanted to See the World, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Prince Who Wanted to See the World, sentence 66

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So the king turned his steps homewards and told his wife.

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**Who acts:** king · **What happens:** turn, tell, step · **To what, where:** steps homewards, wife · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Prince Who Wanted to See the World. 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:pg641:42:66
# text = So the king turned his steps homewards and told his wife.
1	So	so	ADV	RB	_	4	advmod	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	king	king	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
4	turned	turn	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
6	steps	step	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	compound	_	_
7	homewards	homeward	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
9	told	tell	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	conj	_	_
10	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	11	nmod:poss	_	_
11	wife	wife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	iobj	_	SpaceAfter=No
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **turn** | past | the king | steps homewards |  |  |  |  | vn roll-51.3.1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent homeward=Theme |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | past | the king *not said here* |  | king's wife |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent wife=Recipient |
| 3 | **step** |  | king |  |  |  |  |  | nom step «act transitive»: poss=agent |

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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 Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 641 (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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