---
title: Scarcely did its walls hold together, covered all over with moss. — Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Musc… · tree and pragmatics
description: Scarcely did its walls hold together, covered all over with moss. Who acts: Scarcely, walls. A sentence of «Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore», Chapter II. MYTHOLOGICAL, part 9, 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/pg22373/27/115/)

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# Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore, Chapter II. MYTHOLOGICAL, part 9, sentence 115

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Scarcely did its walls hold together, covered all over with moss.

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**Who acts:** Scarcely, walls · **What happens:** do, hold together, cover

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This is a sentence of «Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore», Chapter II. MYTHOLOGICAL, part 9. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Scarcely, walls), 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:pg22373:27:115
# text = Scarcely did its walls hold together, covered all over with moss.
1	Scarcely	Scarcely	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	did	do	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	its	its	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	4	nmod:poss	_	_
4	walls	wall	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	nsubj	_	_
5	hold	hold	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	parataxis	_	_
6	together	together	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
8	covered	cover	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	5	conj	_	_
9	all	all	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
10	over	over	ADV	RB	_	8	advmod	_	_
11	with	with	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
12	moss	moss	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **do** | past | Scarcely |  |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **hold together** | present | church's walls |  |  |  |  | together *property* | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 3 | **cover** | participle | church's walls *not said here* |  |  |  |  | with moss; over *property* | vn fill-9.8-1 «NP V NP PP.theme»: agent=Agent with moss=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:** «Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore», Project Gutenberg book 22373 (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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