---
title: Who can tell how happy the king was? — The Violet Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Who can tell how happy the king was? Who acts: king. A sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lute Player, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Violet Fairy Book, The Lute Player, sentence 78

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Who can tell how happy the king was?

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**Who acts:** king · **What happens:** tell, be · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Violet Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Lute Player. 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:pg641:8:78
# text = Who can tell how happy the king was?
1	Who	who	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	3	nsubj	_	_
2	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	how	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	5	advmod	_	_
5	happy	happy	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	ccomp	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	king	king	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
8	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tell** *speech: assert* | can |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **is** | past | the king |  |  |  |  | happy *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 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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