Elephants: the trunk and everything it does, sentence 14

A newborn calf can't control its trunk yet; it practises for months, sometimes sucking it like a thumb, and until then it kneels to drink with its mouth.

Who acts: newborn calf, calf · What happens: not control, practise, suck, kneel, drink · To what, where: trunk, calf

This is a sentence of the lesson «Elephants: the trunk and everything it does» 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 (newborn calf, calf), 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	3 calf	det
2	newborn	newborn	ADJ	Degree=Pos	3 calf	amod
3	calf	calf	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 control	nsubj
4	ca	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	6 control	aux
5	n't	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	6 control	advmod
6	control	control	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
7	its	its	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	8 trunk	nmod:poss
8	trunk	trunk	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 control	obj
9	yet	yet	ADV	_	6 control	advmod
10	;	;	PUNCT	_	12 practises	punct
11	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	12 practises	nsubj
12	practises	practise	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	6 control	parataxis
13	for	for	ADP	_	14 months	case
14	months	month	NOUN	Number=Plur	12 practises	obl
15	,	,	PUNCT	_	17 sucking	punct
16	sometimes	sometimes	ADV	PronType=Ind	17 sucking	advmod
17	sucking	suck	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	12 practises	advcl
18	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	17 sucking	obj
19	like	like	ADP	_	21 thumb	case
20	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	21 thumb	det
21	thumb	thumb	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 sucking	obl
22	,	,	PUNCT	_	27 kneels	punct
23	and	and	CCONJ	_	27 kneels	cc
24	until	until	ADP	_	25 then	case
25	then	then	ADV	PronType=Dem	27 kneels	obl
26	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	27 kneels	nsubj
27	kneels	kneel	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	17 sucking	conj
28	to	to	PART	_	29 drink	mark
29	drink	drink	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	27 kneels	advcl
30	with	with	ADP	_	32 mouth	case
31	its	its	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	32 mouth	nmod:poss
32	mouth	mouth	NOUN	Number=Sing	29 drink	obl
33	.	.	PUNCT	_	6 control	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	when	other	roles by
1	not control	can	a newborn calf	calf's trunk	yet		vn enforce-63 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent trunk=Theme
2	practise	present	calf		month		tree rules
3	suck	gerund	calf not said here	calf		like a thumb; sometimes property	vn wipe_manner-10.4.1-1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent it=Theme
4	kneel	present	calf				vn assuming_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent
5	drink	to-infinitive	calf not said here			with calf's mouth	vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent

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:021-elephants-the-trunk.lesson:14.

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): R7-rel-agree ×2. 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/21-elephants-the-trunk/14/