---
title: What could that be by the stove? — Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen · tree and pragmatics
description: What could that be by the stove? Who acts: that. 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 78

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What could that be by the stove?

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**Who acts:** that · **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 (that), 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:pg27200:132:78
# text = What could that be by the stove?
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	0	root	_	_
2	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
3	that	that	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	7	nsubj	_	_
4	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	7	cop	_	_
5	by	by	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	stove	stove	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	nsubj	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	1	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | could | that |  |  |  |  | by the stove | 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:** «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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