---
title: What could the elder brother do but confess it! — Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: What could the elder brother do but confess it! Who acts: elder brother. A sentence of «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», The Three Brothers, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, The Three Brothers, sentence 49

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What could the elder brother do but confess it!

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**Who acts:** elder brother · **What happens:** do, confess · **To what, where:** corpse

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This is a sentence of «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», The Three Brothers. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (elder brother), 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:pg29672:18:49
# text = What could the elder brother do but confess it!
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	elder	elder	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	brother	brother	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
6	do	do	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	confess	confess	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	6	conj	_	_
9	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	!	!	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 elder brother |  |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Eventuality |
| 2 | **confess** | infinitive | the elder brother *not said here* | corpse |  |  |  |  | vn confess-37.10 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Topic |

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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:** «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», Project Gutenberg book 29672 (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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