---
title: «a firm paw gripped him by the back of his neck. — The Wind in the Willows, chapter I, part 4: The… · tree and pragmatics
description: «a firm paw gripped him by the back of his neck. Who acts: firm paw. A sentence of the lesson «The Wind in the Willows, chapter I, part 4: The River Bank (the Mole grabs the oars, the boat goes over, and a friendship begins)» of the books course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and 
---

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# The Wind in the Willows, chapter I, part 4: The River Bank (the Mole grabs the oars, the boat goes over, and a friendship begins), sentence 24

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«a firm paw gripped him by the back of his neck.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** firm paw · **What happens:** grip · **To what, where:** Mole

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This is a sentence of the lesson «The Wind in the Willows, chapter I, part 4: The River Bank (the Mole grabs the oars, the boat goes over, and a friendship begins)» of the books 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 (firm paw), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:books:028-willows-ch1-part4-sploosh.lesson:24
# text = «a firm paw gripped him by the back of his neck.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = books
# lesson = 028-willows-ch1-part4-sploosh.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	«	«	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	firm	firm	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	paw	paw	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
5	gripped	grip	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	obj	_	_
7	by	by	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	back	back	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obl	_	_
10	of	of	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
11	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	12	nmod:poss	_	_
12	neck	neck	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nmod	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **grip** *in a quote* | past | a firm paw | Mole |  |  |  | by the back of Mole's neck | vn touch-20-1 «NP V NP PP.theme PP.instrument»: agent=Agent he=Experiencer by back=Theme |

<!-- .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:books:028-willows-ch1-part4-sploosh.lesson:24`.

**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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