---
title: There once lived in a small town in China a man named Hok Lee. — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: There once lived in a small town in China a man named Hok Lee. Who acts: man. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Hok Lee and the Dwarfs, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Green Fairy Book, The Story of Hok Lee and the Dwarfs, sentence 1

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There once lived in a small town in China a man named Hok Lee.

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**Who acts:** man · **What happens:** live, name · **To what, where:** small town, man

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Hok Lee and the Dwarfs. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (man), 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:pg7277:31:1
# text = There once lived in a small town in China a man named Hok Lee.
1	There	there	PRON	EX	PronType=Dem	3	expl	_	_
2	once	once	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Mult	3	advmod	_	_
3	lived	live	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	in	in	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
6	small	small	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	town	town	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	_
8	in	in	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
9	China	China	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	7	nmod	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	man	man	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
12	named	name	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	11	acl	_	_
13	Hok	Hok	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	14	compound	_	_
14	Lee	Lee	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	12	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **live** | past | a man |  |  | a small town in China; there |  | once *property* | vn lodge-46 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme in town=Location |
| 2 | **name** | participle |  | a man *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn appoint-29.1 «NP V NP»: agent=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:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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