Defences: tricks and myths: playing dead, dropping tails, ink, and do ostriches bury their heads?, sentence 12
Stick insects look like twigs and sway like them in the wind, so birds hunting by sight miss them; the longest insect known is a stick insect from China, over 60 centimetres with its legs stretched out.
Who acts: Stick insects, birds, longest insect · What happens: look, sway, hunt, miss, know, be · To what, where: wind, insects, longest insect, stick insect, China, legs
This is a sentence of the lesson «Defences: tricks and myths: playing dead, dropping tails, ink, and do ostriches bury their heads?» 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 (Stick insects, birds, longest insect), 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 | Stick | stick | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 insects | compound |
| 2 | insects | insect | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 look | nsubj |
| 3 | look | look | VERB | Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | like | like | ADP | _ | 5 twigs | case |
| 5 | twigs | twig | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 look | obl |
| 6 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 7 sway | cc |
| 7 | sway | sway | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 3 look | conj |
| 8 | like | like | ADP | _ | 9 them | case |
| 9 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 7 sway | obl |
| 10 | in | in | ADP | _ | 12 wind | case |
| 11 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 12 wind | det |
| 12 | wind | wind | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 sway | obl |
| 13 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 15 birds | punct |
| 14 | so | so | ADV | _ | 19 miss | advmod |
| 15 | birds | bird | NOUN | Number=Plur | 19 miss | nsubj |
| 16 | hunting | hunt | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 15 birds | acl |
| 17 | by | by | ADP | _ | 18 sight | case |
| 18 | sight | sight | NOUN | Number=Sing | 16 hunting | obl |
| 19 | miss | miss | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 3 look | parataxis |
| 20 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 19 miss | obj |
| 21 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 29 insect | punct |
| 22 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 24 insect | det |
| 23 | longest | long | ADJ | Degree=Sup | 24 insect | amod |
| 24 | insect | insect | NOUN | Number=Sing | 29 insect | nsubj |
| 25 | known | know | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 24 insect | acl |
| 26 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 29 insect | cop |
| 27 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 29 insect | det |
| 28 | stick | stick | NOUN | Number=Sing | 29 insect | compound |
| 29 | insect | insect | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 look | parataxis |
| 30 | from | from | ADP | _ | 31 China | case |
| 31 | China | China | PROPN | Number=Sing | 29 insect | nmod |
| 32 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 35 centimetres | punct |
| 33 | over | over | ADV | _ | 34 60 | advmod |
| 34 | 60 | 60 | NUM | NumForm=Digit NumType=Card | 35 centimetres | nummod |
| 35 | centimetres | centimetre | NOUN | Number=Plur | 29 insect | nmod:unmarked |
| 36 | with | with | SCONJ | _ | 39 stretched | mark |
| 37 | its | its | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 38 legs | nmod:poss |
| 38 | legs | leg | NOUN | Number=Plur | 39 stretched | nsubj:pass |
| 39 | stretched | stretch | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 29 insect | advcl |
| 40 | out | out | ADP | _ | 39 stretched | compound:prt |
| 41 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 look | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | look | infinitive | Stick insects | like twigs | vn stimulus_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus | ||||
| 2 | sway | infinitive | Stick insects not said here | the wind | like insects = insect | vn modes_of_being_with_motion-47.3 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme in wind=Location | |||
| 3 | hunt | gerund | birds not said here | by sight | vn hunt-35.1 «NP V PP.theme PP.location»: agent=Agent by sight=Location | ||||
| 4 | miss | present | birds | insects = insect | vn admire-31.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer they=Stimulus | ||||
| 5 | know | participle | the longest insect not said here | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer | |||||
| 6 | is a | present | the longest insect | a stick insect | China | 60 centimetres nmod:unmarked | tree rules | ||
| 7 | stretch out | participle · passive | bird's legs | vn bend-45.2 «NP V NP.patient»: subject=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:249-defences-tricks-and-myths-playing-dead-dropping-tails-ink-and-ostriches.lesson:12.
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/249-defences-tricks-and-myths-playing-dead-dropping-tails-ink-and-ostriches/12/