---
title: I call it buying a pig in a poke.’ — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: I call it buying a pig in a poke.’ Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Caliph Stork, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg7277/7/149/)

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# The Green Fairy Book, The Story of Caliph Stork, sentence 149

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I call it buying a pig in a poke.’

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** call, buy · **To what, where:** Highness, pig, poke · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «The Green Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Caliph Stork. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), 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:pg7277:7:149
# text = I call it buying a pig in a poke.’
1	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	call	call	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	obj	_	_
4	buying	buy	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	2	xcomp	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	pig	pig	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
7	in	in	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	poke	poke	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	’	'	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **call** | present | I | Highness |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **buy** | gerund | I *not said here* | a pig |  | a poke |  |  | vn accept-77.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent pig=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 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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