---
title: What if the arrow should not carry true? — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: What if the arrow should not carry true? Who acts: arrow. 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.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/23/17/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [Fifty Famous Stories Retold](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/) / [The Story of William Tell.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/23/) / 17

# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Story of William Tell., sentence 17

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
What if the arrow should not carry true?

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** arrow · **What happens:** not carry

<!-- .vabout -->
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 (arrow), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg18442:23:17
# text = What if the arrow should not carry true?
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	0	root	_	_
2	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	7	mark	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	arrow	arrow	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
5	should	should	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
6	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	7	advmod	_	_
7	carry	carry	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	1	advcl	_	_
8	true	true	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **carry** | should | the arrow |  |  |  |  | true *property* | vn carry-11.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**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.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/23/16/)
- next →: [sentence 18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/23/18/)
- ↑ back to [The Story of William Tell.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/23/)