---
title: There are more difficult things to believe than that. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: There are more difficult things to believe than that. Who acts: difficult things. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Ratcatcher, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Ratcatcher, sentence 100

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There are more difficult things to believe than that.

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**Who acts:** difficult things · **What happens:** be, believe

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Ratcatcher. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (difficult things), 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:pg540:32:100
# text = There are more difficult things to believe than that.
1	There	there	PRON	EX	PronType=Dem	2	expl	_	_
2	are	be	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	more	more	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	4	advmod	_	_
4	difficult	difficult	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	things	thing	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
6	to	to	PART	TO	_	7	mark	_	_
7	believe	believe	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	acl	_	_
8	than	than	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
9	that	that	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	7	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **does** | present | difficult things |  |  | there |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **believe** | to-infinitive | difficult things *not said here* |  |  |  |  | than difficult things | vn admire-31.2 «NP V that S»: agent=Experiencer |

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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 Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 540 (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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