---
title: Elephants investigate new things carefully with their trunks and can… — Myth check: are elephants scared of mice? · tree and pragmatics
description: Elephants investigate new things carefully with their trunks and can smell water several kilometres away. Who acts: Elephants. A sentence of the lesson «Myth check: are elephants scared of mice?» of the biology course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clau
---

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# Myth check: are elephants scared of mice?, sentence 13

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Elephants investigate new things carefully with their trunks and can smell water several kilometres away.

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**Who acts:** Elephants · **What happens:** investigate, smell · **To what, where:** new things, water

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Myth check: are elephants scared of mice?» 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 (Elephants), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:biology:149-myth-check-are-elephants-scared-of-mice.lesson:13
# text = Elephants investigate new things carefully with their trunks and can smell water several kilometres away.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = biology
# lesson = 149-myth-check-are-elephants-scared-of-mice.lesson
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change
1	Elephants	elephant	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	investigate	investigate	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	new	new	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	things	thing	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obj	_	_
5	carefully	carefully	ADV	RB	_	2	advmod	_	_
6	with	with	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
7	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	trunks	trunk	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obl	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
10	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	11	aux	_	_
11	smell	smell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	conj	_	_
12	water	water	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obj	_	_
13	several	several	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	14	amod	_	_
14	kilometres	kilometre	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	15	obl:unmarked	_	_
15	away	away	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	_
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **investigate** | present | Elephants | new things |  |  |  | with things's trunks; carefully *property* | vn assessment-34.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent thing=Theme |
| 2 | **smell** | can | Elephants *not said here* | water |  |  |  | away *property* | vn see-30.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer water=Stimulus |

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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.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/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:149-myth-check-are-elephants-scared-of-mice.lesson:13`.

**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): no change. **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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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