---
title: What if the boy should move? — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: What if the boy should move? Who acts: boy. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Story of William Tell., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Story of William Tell., sentence 15

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What if the boy should move?

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**Who acts:** boy · **What happens:** move

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Story of William Tell.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (boy), 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:pg18442:23:15
# text = What if the boy should move?
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	6	obj	_	_
2	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	6	mark	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	boy	boy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
5	should	should	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
6	move	move	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **move** | should | the boy |  |  |  |  |  | vn roll-51.3.1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent what=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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