---
title: The Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina used once to be living people. — Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Musc… · tree and pragmatics
description: The Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina used once to be living people. Who acts: Dnieper. A sentence of «Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore», Chapter III. MYTHOLOGICAL, part 4, 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/pg22373/38/117/)

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# Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore, Chapter III. MYTHOLOGICAL, part 4, sentence 117

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The Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina used once to be living people.

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**Who acts:** Dnieper · **What happens:** use, be · **To what, where:** living people

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This is a sentence of «Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore», Chapter III. MYTHOLOGICAL, part 4. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Dnieper), 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:pg22373:38:117
# text = The Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina used once to be living people.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	Dnieper	Dnieper	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	8	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	4	punct	_	_
4	Volga	Volga	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
6	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
7	Dvina	Dvina	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	8	nsubj	_	_
8	used	use	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	once	once	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Mult	8	advmod	_	_
10	to	to	PART	TO	_	13	mark	_	_
11	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	13	cop	_	_
12	living	living	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	amod	_	_
13	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **use** | past | the Dnieper and Volga |  |  |  |  | once *property* | vn eat-39.1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **is a** | to-infinitive | the Dnieper and Volga *not said here* | living people |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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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