---
title: One good pinch, and the magic word transformed him to a stork. — The Green Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: One good pinch, and the magic word transformed him to a stork. Who acts: magic word. 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/pg7277/7/184/)

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# The Green Fairy Book, The Story of Caliph Stork, sentence 184

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One good pinch, and the magic word transformed him to a stork.

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**Who acts:** magic word · **What happens:** transform · **To what, where:** One good pinch

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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 (magic word), 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:pg7277:7:184
# text = One good pinch, and the magic word transformed him to a stork.
1	One	one	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	3	nummod	_	_
2	good	good	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	pinch	pinch	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obl:unmarked	_	SpaceAfter=No
4	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
5	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
7	magic	magic	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	compound	_	_
8	word	word	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
9	transformed	transform	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
10	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	9	obj	_	_
11	to	to	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
12	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	stork	stork	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **transform** | past | the magic word | One good pinch |  |  |  | to a stork | vn turn-26.6.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent he=Patient |

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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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