---
title: What could the poor country people do against such foes as these? — Fifty Famous Stories Retold · tree and pragmatics
description: What could the poor country people do against such foes as these? Who acts: people. A sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Arnold Winkelried., with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/24/11/)

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# Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Arnold Winkelried., sentence 11

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What could the poor country people do against such foes as these?

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**Who acts:** people · **What happens:** do · **To what, where:** poor country

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This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Arnold Winkelried.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (people), 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:pg18442:24:11
# text = What could the poor country people do against such foes as these?
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	0	root	_	_
2	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	1	aux	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	poor	poor	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	country	country	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
6	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nsubj	_	_
7	do	do	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	5	acl:relcl	_	_
8	against	against	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
9	such	such	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	foes	foe	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	obl	_	_
11	as	as	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
12	these	this	PRON	DT	Number=Plur|PronType=Dem	10	nmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **do** | present | people | the poor country *not said here* |  |  |  | against such foes as these | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent country=Eventuality |

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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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- ← previous: [sentence 10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/24/10/)
- next →: [sentence 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/24/12/)
- ↑ back to [Arnold Winkelried.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg18442/24/)