---
title: But what could I do? — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: But what could I do? Who acts: I. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Pretty Goldilocks, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/28/113/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [The Blue Fairy Book](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/) / [The Story of Pretty Goldilocks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/28/) / 113

# The Blue Fairy Book, The Story of Pretty Goldilocks, sentence 113

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
But what could I do?

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** I · **What happens:** do

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Story of Pretty Goldilocks. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (I), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**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:pg503:28:113
# text = But what could I do?
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
2	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	5	obj	_	_
3	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
5	do	do	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **do** | could | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Eventuality |

<!-- .note -->
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.

<!-- div src -->

**Text:** «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 503 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [sentence 112](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/28/112/)
- next →: [sentence 114](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/28/114/)
- ↑ back to [The Story of Pretty Goldilocks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg503/28/)