Reading a dog: tails, play bows, growls and staying safe, sentence 8

A tail tucked between the legs means the dog is scared, and a frightened dog that is cornered may bite, so it needs space.

Who acts: tail, dog, frightened dog, vet · What happens: tuck, mean, be, corner, bite, need · To what, where: tail, legs, frightened dog, space · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of the lesson «Reading a dog: tails, play bows, growls and staying safe» 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 (tail, dog, frightened dog, vet), 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	A	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	2 tail	det
2	tail	tail	NOUN	Number=Sing	7 means	nsubj
3	tucked	tuck	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	2 tail	acl
4	between	between	ADP	_	6 legs	case
5	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	6 legs	det
6	legs	leg	NOUN	Number=Plur	3 tucked	obl
7	means	mean	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
8	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	9 dog	det
9	dog	dog	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 scared	nsubj
10	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	11 scared	cop
11	scared	scared	ADJ	Degree=Pos	7 means	ccomp
12	,	,	PUNCT	_	21 bite	punct
13	and	and	CCONJ	_	21 bite	cc
14	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	16 dog	det
15	frightened	frighten	ADJ	Degree=Pos	16 dog	amod
16	dog	dog	NOUN	Number=Sing	21 bite	nsubj
17	that	that	PRON	PronType=Rel	19 cornered	nsubj:pass
18	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	19 cornered	aux:pass
19	cornered	corner	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	16 dog	acl:relcl
20	may	may	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	21 bite	aux
21	bite	bite	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	7 means	conj
22	,	,	PUNCT	_	25 needs	punct
23	so	so	ADV	_	25 needs	advmod
24	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	25 needs	nsubj
25	needs	need	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	7 means	conj
26	space	space	NOUN	Number=Sing	25 needs	obj
27	.	.	PUNCT	_	7 means	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	tuck	participle		a tail not said here	the legs		vn funnel-9.3-1 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent between leg=Destination
2	mean	present	a tail				vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent
3	is	present	the dog			scared property	tree rules
4	corner	present · passive		a frightened dog			tree rules
5	bite	may	a frightened dog				vn swat-18.2 «NP V PP»: agent=Agent
6	need	present	vet	space			vn want-32.1-1-1 «NP V NP ADV»: agent=Pivot space=Theme

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:194-reading-a-dog-tails-play-bows-growls-and-staying-safe.lesson:8.

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): R5-strong ×1, R8-pos-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/194-reading-a-dog-tails-play-bows-growls-and-staying-safe/8/