---
title: What could it be? — The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North · tree and pragmatics
description: What could it be? Who acts: apple. A sentence of «The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North» by James Baldwin, The Triumph of Music, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Sampo: A Wonder Tale of the Old North, The Triumph of Music, sentence 23

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What could it be?

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

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

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**Mova's own parse.** This tree may be wrong.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg66819:35:23
# text = What could it be?
1	What	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	4	obj	_	_
2	could	could	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	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

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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 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.

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