---
title: There was once a blind old man called Dvina. — Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Musc… · tree and pragmatics
description: There was once a blind old man called Dvina. Who acts: blind old man. 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/pg22373/38/96/)

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# Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore, Chapter III. MYTHOLOGICAL, part 4, sentence 96

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There was once a blind old man called Dvina.

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**Who acts:** blind old man · **What happens:** be, call · **To what, where:** blind old man · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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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 (blind old man), 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:pg22373:38:96
# text = There was once a blind old man called Dvina.
1	There	there	PRON	EX	PronType=Dem	2	expl	_	_
2	was	be	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	once	once	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Mult	2	advmod	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
5	blind	blind	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
6	old	old	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	man	man	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
8	called	call	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	7	acl	_	_
9	Dvina	Dvina	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	8	xcomp	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **be** | past | a blind old man |  |  | there |  | once *property* | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **call** | participle |  | a blind old man *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn initiate\_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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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