---
title: I'd sooner have the devil!" — Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Musc… · tree and pragmatics
description: I'd sooner have the devil!" Who acts: I. A sentence of «Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore», Chapter VI. LEGENDS, part 5, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore, Chapter VI. LEGENDS, part 5, sentence 67

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I'd sooner have the devil!"

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**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** have · **To what, where:** devil

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This is a sentence of «Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore», Chapter VI. LEGENDS, part 5. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), 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:pg22373:60:67
# text = I'd sooner have the devil!"
1	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
2	'd	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	sooner	soon	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	4	advmod	_	_
4	have	have	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	devil	devil	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **have** | would | I | the devil |  |  |  | soon *property* | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent devil=Patient |

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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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