---
title: It was not for nothing that these difficulties and dangers were in h… — Irish Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: It was not for nothing that these difficulties and dangers were in his path. Who acts: giant, that. A sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter X, 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/pg2892/71/13/)

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# Irish Fairy Tales, Chapter X, sentence 13

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It was not for nothing that these difficulties and dangers were in his path.

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**Who acts:** giant, that · **What happens:** not be, be · **To what, where:** path

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This is a sentence of «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Chapter X. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (giant, 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:pg2892:71:13
# text = It was not for nothing that these difficulties and dangers were in his path.
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
2	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	5	advmod	_	_
4	for	for	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
5	nothing	nothing	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Neg	0	root	_	_
6	that	that	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	14	nsubj	_	_
7	these	this	DET	DT	Number=Plur|PronType=Dem	8	det	_	_
8	difficulties	difficulty	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	nsubj	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	dangers	danger	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	conj	_	_
11	were	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	14	cop	_	_
12	in	in	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
13	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	14	nmod:poss	_	_
14	path	path	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	parataxis	_	SpaceAfter=No
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **is** | past | giant |  |  |  |  | for nothing | tree rules |
| 2 | **is** | past | that |  |  | Art's path |  |  | 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:** «Irish Fairy Tales» by James Stephens, Project Gutenberg book 2892 (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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