---
title: But what might this something be? — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: But what might this something be? Who acts: something. A sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, What the Old Man Does Is Always Right, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, What the Old Man Does Is Always Right, sentence 13

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But what might this something be?

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**Who acts:** something · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, What the Old Man Does Is Always Right. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (something), 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:pg27200:132:13
# text = But what might this something be?
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
2	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	6	obj	_	_
3	might	might	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
4	this	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	5	det	_	_
5	something	something	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	6	nsubj	_	_
6	be	be	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **be** | might | something |  |  |  |  |  | vn representation-110.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Pivot what=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:** «Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen» by H. C. Andersen, Project Gutenberg book 27200 (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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