---
title: He could not step across. — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: He could not step across. Who acts: beau. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Sir Walter Raleigh., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Sir Walter Raleigh., sentence 9

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He could not step across.

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**Who acts:** beau · **What happens:** not step

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Sir Walter Raleigh.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (beau), 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:pg18442:20:9
# text = He could not step across.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
2	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	step	step	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	across	across	ADV	RB	_	4	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **step** | could | beau |  |  |  |  | across *property* | vn run-51.3.2 «NP V»: agent=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:** «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 18442 (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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