---
title: What can it be?” — The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North · tree and pragmatics
description: What can it be?” Who acts: moaning. A sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, Mistress and Minstrel, 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/pg66819/2/36/)

<!-- 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 Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old No…](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg66819/) / [Mistress and Minstrel](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg66819/2/) / 36

# The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, Mistress and Minstrel, sentence 36

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
What can it be?”

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** moaning · **What happens:** be

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, Mistress and Minstrel. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (moaning), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**Mova's own parse.** This tree may be wrong.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg66819:2:36
# text = What can it be?”
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	4	obj	_	_
2	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	nsubj	_	_
4	be	be	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	SpaceAfter=No
5	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **can** | can | moaning |  |  |  |  | What *obj* | vn representation-110.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Pivot what=Theme |

<!-- .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 Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 66819 (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 35](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg66819/2/35/)
- next →: [sentence 37](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg66819/2/37/)
- ↑ back to [Mistress and Minstrel](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg66819/2/)