---
title: But when they saw Blacky appear at the entrance to the den their joy… — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: But when they saw Blacky appear at the entrance to the den their joy knew no bounds. Who acts: grunts, Blacky, joy. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Three Little Pigs, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Green Fairy Book, The Three Little Pigs, sentence 79

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But when they saw Blacky appear at the entrance to the den their joy knew no bounds.

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**Who acts:** grunts, Blacky, joy · **What happens:** see, appear, know, joy · **To what, where:** Blacky, entrance, bounds

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Three Little Pigs. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (grunts, Blacky, joy), 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:pg7277:1123`): 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:pg7277:13:79
# text = But when they saw Blacky appear at the entrance to the den their joy knew no bounds.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	15	cc	_	_
2	when	when	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	4	advmod	_	_
3	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
4	saw	see	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	15	advcl	_	_
5	Blacky	Blacky	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
6	appear	appear	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	xcomp	_	_
7	at	at	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	entrance	entrance	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obl	_	_
10	to	to	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
11	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	den	den	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nmod	_	_
13	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	14	nmod:poss	_	_
14	joy	joy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	15	nsubj	_	_
15	knew	know	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
16	no	no	DET	DT	PronType=Neg	17	det	_	_
17	bounds	bound	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	15	obj	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	15	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **see** | past | grunts *= grunt* | Blacky |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **appear** | infinitive | Blacky *not said here* |  |  | the entrance to the den |  |  | vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme at entrance=Location |
| 3 | **know** | past | grunts's joy | no bounds |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Experiencer bound=Stimulus |
| 4 | **joy** |  | grunts *= grunt* |  |  |  |  |  | nom joy «feeling 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 Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 7277 (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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