Myth check: do ostriches bury their heads in the sand?, sentence 15

Ostriches cannot fly, but their wings help them balance, steer and turn sharply when running, shade their chicks and cool them on hot days.

Who acts: Ostriches, wings, adults · What happens: not fly, help, balance, steer, turn, run · To what, where: adults, chicks

This is a sentence of the lesson «Myth check: do ostriches bury their heads in the sand?» of the biology course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Ostriches, wings, adults), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	Ostriches	ostrich	NOUN	Number=Plur	4 fly	nsubj
2	can	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	4 fly	aux
3	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	4 fly	advmod
4	fly	fly	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
5	,	,	PUNCT	_	9 help	punct
6	but	but	CCONJ	_	9 help	cc
7	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	8 wings	nmod:poss
8	wings	wing	NOUN	Number=Plur	9 help	nsubj
9	help	help	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	4 fly	conj
10	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	9 help	obj
11	balance	balance	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	9 help	xcomp
12	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 steer	punct
13	steer	steer	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	11 balance	conj
14	and	and	CCONJ	_	15 turn	cc
15	turn	turn	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	11 balance	conj
16	sharply	sharply	ADV	_	15 turn	advmod
17	when	when	ADV	PronType=Int	18 running	advmod
18	running	run	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	15 turn	advcl
19	,	,	PUNCT	_	20 shade	punct
20	shade	shade	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	4 fly	parataxis
21	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	22 chicks	nmod:poss
22	chicks	chick	NOUN	Number=Plur	20 shade	obj
23	and	and	CCONJ	_	24 cool	cc
24	cool	cool	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	20 shade	conj
25	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	24 cool	obj
26	on	on	ADP	_	28 days	case
27	hot	hot	ADJ	Degree=Pos	28 days	amod
28	days	day	NOUN	Number=Plur	24 cool	obl
29	.	.	PUNCT	_	4 fly	punct

Pragmatics

form: statement
act: assert
voice: narrator
polarity: none
teacher: changed polarity=none

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	when	other	roles by
1	not fly	can	Ostriches					vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	help	present	adults's wings	adults = adult				vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V NP S_INF»: agent=Agent they=Beneficiary clause=Theme
3	balance	infinitive	adults = adult not said here					vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
4	steer	infinitive	adults = adult not said here					vn accompany-51.7 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent
5	turn	infinitive	adults = adult not said here				sharply property	vn roll-51.3.1 «NP.theme V»: agent=Theme
6	run	gerund	adults = adult not said here					vn run-51.3.2-2-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
7	shade	present			adults's chicks			vn defend-72.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent chick=Beneficiary
8	cool	infinitive		adults = adult		day		vn other_cos-45.4 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Agent they=Patient

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.

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, mova-school-agreed-en.conllu) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence school:biology:151-ostriches-and-heads-in-the-sand.lesson:15.

The tree: Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R1-cc-next ×1, R3-conj-first ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1. The frames are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (prag) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the release 0.4.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/151-ostriches-and-heads-in-the-sand/15/