The Crimson Fairy Book, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 27, sentence 41

What could the poor man do but promise?

Who acts: poor man · What happens: do, promise

This is a sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 27. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (poor man), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	What	what	PRON	PronType=Int	6 do	obj
2	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	6 do	aux
3	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 man	det
4	poor	poor	ADJ	Degree=Pos	5 man	amod
5	man	man	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 do	nsubj
6	do	do	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
7	but	but	CCONJ	_	8 promise	cc
8	promise	promise	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	6 do	conj
9	?	?	PUNCT	_	6 do	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	do	could	the poor man						vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Eventuality
2	promise speech: promise	infinitive	the poor man not said here						vn promise-37.13 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent

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.

Text: «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 2435 (public domain in the USA). Tree: Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg2435/27/41/