---
title: Could anything be more terrible?” — The Blue Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Could anything be more terrible?” Who acts: anything. A sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Yellow Dwarf, part 3, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Blue Fairy Book, The Yellow Dwarf, part 3, sentence 89

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Could anything be more terrible?”

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

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This is a sentence of «The Blue Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Yellow Dwarf, part 3. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (anything), 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:pg503:7:89
# text = Could anything be more terrible?”
1	Could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
2	anything	anything	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	5	nsubj	_	_
3	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	cop	_	_
4	more	more	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	5	advmod	_	_
5	terrible	terrible	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | could | anything |  |  |  |  | terrible *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:** «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.

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