---
title: What if the bow-man's hand should tremble? — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: What if the bow-man's hand should tremble? Who acts: hand. 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 16

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What if the bow-man's hand should tremble?

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**Who acts:** hand · **What happens:** tremble

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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 (hand), 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:pg18442:23:16
# text = What if the bow-man's hand should tremble?
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	0	root	_	_
2	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	10	mark	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
4	bow	bow	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	compound	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	man	man	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nmod:poss	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	's	's	PART	POS	_	6	case	_	_
8	hand	hand	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
9	should	should	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	10	aux	_	_
10	tremble	tremble	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	1	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **tremble** | should | the bow man's hand |  |  |  |  |  | vn modes\_of\_being\_with\_motion-47.3 «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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