How owls work: silent wings, turning heads, pellets and owl myths, sentence 19

Because its eyes cannot roll, an owl bobs and sways its head to look at a thing from slightly different places, which helps it judge how far away the thing is.

Who acts: eyes, owl, daylight, thing · What happens: not roll, bob, sway, look, help, judge · To what, where: head

This is a sentence of the lesson «How owls work: silent wings, turning heads, pellets and owl myths» 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 (eyes, owl, daylight, thing), 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	Because	because	SCONJ	_	6 roll	mark
2	its	its	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	3 eyes	nmod:poss
3	eyes	eye	NOUN	Number=Plur	6 roll	nsubj
4	can	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	6 roll	aux
5	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	6 roll	advmod
6	roll	roll	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	10 bobs	advcl
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	10 bobs	punct
8	an	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	9 owl	det
9	owl	owl	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 bobs	nsubj
10	bobs	bob	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
11	and	and	CCONJ	_	12 sways	cc
12	sways	sway	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	10 bobs	conj
13	its	its	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	14 head	nmod:poss
14	head	head	NOUN	Number=Sing	12 sways	obj
15	to	to	PART	_	16 look	mark
16	look	look	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	12 sways	advcl
17	at	at	ADP	_	19 thing	case
18	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	19 thing	det
19	thing	thing	NOUN	Number=Sing	16 look	obl
20	from	from	ADP	_	23 places	case
21	slightly	slightly	ADV	_	22 different	advmod
22	different	different	ADJ	Degree=Pos	23 places	amod
23	places	place	NOUN	Number=Plur	16 look	obl
24	,	,	PUNCT	_	26 helps	punct
25	which	which	PRON	PronType=Rel	26 helps	nsubj
26	helps	help	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	16 look	advcl
27	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	28 judge	nsubj
28	judge	judge	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	26 helps	xcomp
29	how	how	ADV	PronType=Int	30 far	advmod
30	far	far	ADV	Degree=Pos	31 away	advmod
31	away	away	ADV	_	28 judge	ccomp
32	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	33 thing	det
33	thing	thing	NOUN	Number=Sing	34 is	nsubj
34	is	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	26 helps	advcl
35	.	.	PUNCT	_	10 bobs	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	not roll	can	daylight's eyes			vn run-51.3.2-2 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	bob	present	a owl			vn curtsey-40.3.3 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	sway	present	a owl not said here	daylight's head		vn modes_of_being_with_motion-47.3 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location head=Theme
4	look	to-infinitive	a owl not said here		from different places; at a thing	vn peer-30.3 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent at thing=Theme
5	help	present				vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V NP S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Theme
6	judge	infinitive	daylight			vn estimate-34.2-1-1 «NP V whether/if S»: agent=Agent
7	be	present	the thing			vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=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:302-how-owls-work-silent-wings-turning-heads-pellets-and-owl-myths.lesson:19.

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, 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/302-how-owls-work-silent-wings-turning-heads-pellets-and-owl-myths/19/