---
title: What could the poor man do but promise? — The Crimson Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: What could the poor man do but promise? Who acts: poor man. A sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 27, 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/pg2435/27/41/)

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# The Crimson Fairy Book, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 27, sentence 41

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What could the poor man do but promise?

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**Who acts:** poor man · **What happens:** do, promise

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This is a sentence of «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book, part 27. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (poor 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:pg2435:27:41
# text = What could the poor man do but promise?
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	6	obj	_	_
2	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	poor	poor	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	man	man	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
6	do	do	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	promise	promise	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	conj	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **do** | could | the poor man |  |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Eventuality |
| 2 | **promise** *speech: promise* | infinitive | the poor man *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn promise-37.13 «NP V that S»: 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:** «The Crimson Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 2435 (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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