---
title: He couldn’t help doing so. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: He couldn’t help doing so. Who acts: Ivan. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Death of Koshchei the Deathless, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Death of Koshchei the Deathless, sentence 64

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He couldn’t help doing so.

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**Who acts:** Ivan · **What happens:** not help, do

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Death of Koshchei the Deathless. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Ivan), 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:pg540:7:64
# text = He couldn’t help doing so.
1	He	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
2	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	SpaceAfter=No
3	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	help	help	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	doing	do	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	4	xcomp	_	_
6	so	so	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **help** | could | Ivan |  |  |  |  |  | vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V NP S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Theme |
| 2 | **do** *not said to happen* | gerund | Ivan *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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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