---
title: Then he could not tell what to do. — English Fairy Tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Then he could not tell what to do. Who acts: wolf. A sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Story of the Three Little Pigs, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# English Fairy Tales, The Story of the Three Little Pigs, sentence 56

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Then he could not tell what to do.

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**Who acts:** wolf · **What happens:** not tell, do · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, The Story of the Three Little Pigs. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (wolf), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg7439:740`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg7439:17:56
# text = Then he could not tell what to do.
1	Then	then	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	5	advmod	_	_
2	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
3	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	5	advmod	_	_
5	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
6	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Int	8	obj	_	_
7	to	to	PART	TO	_	8	mark	_	_
8	do	do	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	ccomp	_	_
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **tell** *speech: assert* | could | wolf |  |  |  | then |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V how S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **do** *not said to happen* | to-infinitive |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent what=Eventuality |

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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:** «English Fairy Tales» by Joseph Jacobs, Project Gutenberg book 7439 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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