---
title: They can do nothing! — Old Indian Legends · tree and pragmatics
description: They can do nothing! Who acts: people. A sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, The Warlike Seven, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Old Indian Legends, The Warlike Seven, sentence 42

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They can do nothing!

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**Who acts:** people · **What happens:** do · **To what, where:** nothing

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This is a sentence of «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, The Warlike Seven. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (people), 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:pg338:15:42
# text = They can do nothing!
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	do	do	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	nothing	nothing	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Neg	3	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	!	!	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **do** | can | people | nothing |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent nothing=Eventuality |

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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:** «Old Indian Legends» by Zitkala-Sa, Project Gutenberg book 338 (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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