---
title: But what was he to do? — Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: But what was he to do? Who acts: man. A sentence of «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», The Story of the Wind, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, The Story of the Wind, sentence 53

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But what was he to do?

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

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This is a sentence of «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales», The Story of the Wind. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (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:pg29672:3:53
# text = But what was he to do?
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
2	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	6	obj	_	_
3	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
4	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
5	to	to	PART	TO	_	6	mark	_	_
6	do	do	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 | **is** | past | man |  |  |  |  | do *property* | 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:** «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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