---
title: Polar bears wait beside breathing holes in the ice to catch seals, a… — Bears · tree and pragmatics
description: Polar bears wait beside breathing holes in the ice to catch seals, and can smell a seal under snow from about a kilometre away. Who acts: Polar bears. A sentence of the lesson «Bears» of the biology course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Bears, sentence 8

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Polar bears wait beside breathing holes in the ice to catch seals, and can smell a seal under snow from about a kilometre away.

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**Who acts:** Polar bears · **What happens:** wait, breathe, catch, smell · **To what, where:** breathing holes, seals, seal, snow

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Bears» 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 (Polar bears), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:biology:023-bears.lesson:8
# text = Polar bears wait beside breathing holes in the ice to catch seals, and can smell a seal under snow from about a kilometre away.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = biology
# lesson = 023-bears.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	Polar	polar	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	amod	_	_
2	bears	bear	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	nsubj	_	_
3	wait	wait	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	beside	beside	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
5	breathing	breathe	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	6	amod	_	_
6	holes	hole	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obl	_	_
7	in	in	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	ice	ice	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	_
10	to	to	PART	TO	_	11	mark	_	_
11	catch	catch	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	advcl	_	_
12	seals	seal	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	obj	_	_
13	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	16	punct	_	_
14	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	16	cc	_	_
15	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	16	aux	_	_
16	smell	smell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	conj	_	_
17	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	18	det	_	_
18	seal	seal	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	16	obj	_	_
19	under	under	ADP	IN	_	20	case	_	_
20	snow	snow	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	18	nmod	_	_
21	from	from	ADP	IN	_	24	case	_	_
22	about	about	ADV	RB	_	24	advmod	_	_
23	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	24	det	_	_
24	kilometre	kilometre	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	16	obl	_	_
25	away	away	ADV	RB	_	24	advmod	_	_
26	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	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 | **wait** | present | Polar bears |  |  | breathing holes in the ice |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme beside hole=Location |
| 2 | **breathe** | gerund |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn breathe-40.1.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **catch** | to-infinitive | Polar bears *not said here* | seals |  |  |  |  | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent seal=Theme |
| 4 | **smell** | can | Polar bears *not said here* | a seal |  | snow |  | from a kilometre | vn stalk-35.3 «NP V NP PP.location»: agent=Agent seal=Theme under snow=Location |

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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:023-bears.lesson:8`.

**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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