---
title: Giant African land snails can grow shells longer than a child's hand… — The Congo rainforest: gorillas, bonobos, okapis… · tree and pragmatics
description: Giant African land snails can grow shells longer than a child's hand and have thousands of tiny teeth on a ribbon called a radula. Who acts: Giant African land snails, ribbon. A sentence of the lesson «The Congo rainforest: gorillas, bonobos, okapis and forest elephants» of the biology course of Mov
---

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# The Congo rainforest: gorillas, bonobos, okapis and forest elephants, sentence 15

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Giant African land snails can grow shells longer than a child's hand and have thousands of tiny teeth on a ribbon called a radula.

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**Who acts:** Giant African land snails, ribbon · **What happens:** grow, have, call · **To what, where:** shells, thousands, ribbon, radula · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «The Congo rainforest: gorillas, bonobos, okapis and forest elephants» 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 (Giant African land snails, ribbon), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:biology:159-the-congo-rainforest.lesson:15
# text = Giant African land snails can grow shells longer than a child's hand and have thousands of tiny teeth on a ribbon called a radula.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = biology
# lesson = 159-the-congo-rainforest.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): R5-strong ×1
1	Giant	giant	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
2	African	African	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
3	land	land	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	compound	_	_
4	snails	snail	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
5	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
6	grow	grow	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
7	shells	shell	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obj	_	_
8	longer	long	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	6	advmod	_	_
9	than	than	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	child	child	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	nmod:poss	_	_
12	's	's	PART	POS	_	11	case	_	_
13	hand	hand	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obl	_	_
14	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	15	cc	_	_
15	have	have	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	conj	_	_
16	thousands	thousand	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	15	obj	_	_
17	of	of	ADP	IN	_	19	case	_	_
18	tiny	tiny	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	19	amod	_	_
19	teeth	tooth	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	16	nmod	_	_
20	on	on	ADP	IN	_	22	case	_	_
21	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	22	det	_	_
22	ribbon	ribbon	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	15	obl	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=19:nmod
23	called	call	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	22	acl	_	_
24	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	25	det	_	_
25	radula	radula	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	23	obj	_	_
26	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **grow** | can | Giant African land snails | shells |  |  |  | long *property* | vn appear-48.1.1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location shell=Theme |
| 2 | **have** | present | Giant African land snails *not said here* | thousands of tiny teeth |  | a ribbon |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent thousand=Patient |
| 3 | **call** | participle | a ribbon *not said here* | a radula |  |  |  |  | vn initiate\_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent radula=Recipient |

<!-- .note -->
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:159-the-congo-rainforest.lesson:15`.

**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. **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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