---
title: Animals do not understand jokes; pranks frighten, stress or hurt them. — Pranks: harmless fun or real harm? · tree and pragmatics
description: Animals do not understand jokes; pranks frighten, stress or hurt them. Who acts: Animals, pranks. A sentence of the lesson «Pranks: harmless fun or real harm?» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Pranks: harmless fun or real harm?, sentence 24

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Animals do not understand jokes; pranks frighten, stress or hurt them.

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**Who acts:** Animals, pranks · **What happens:** not understand, frighten, hurt · **To what, where:** jokes, animals

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Pranks: harmless fun or real harm?» of the everyday 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 (Animals, pranks), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:204-pranks.lesson:24
# text = Animals do not understand jokes; pranks frighten, stress or hurt them.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 204-pranks.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, R8-pos-agree ×1
1	Animals	animal	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
2	do	do	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	understand	understand	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	jokes	joke	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	_
6	;	;	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
7	pranks	prank	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	nsubj	_	_
8	frighten	frighten	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	parataxis	_	_
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
10	stress	stress	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	conj	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=5:conj
11	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
12	hurt	hurt	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	conj	_	Agree=R8-pos-agree|Haiku=4:conj|HaikuPos=VERB:VB:VerbForm=Inf
13	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	obj	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **understand** | present · do-support | Animals | jokes |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Experiencer joke=Stimulus |
| 2 | **frighten** | present | pranks |  |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer |
| 3 | **hurt** | present | Animals *not said here* | animals *= animal* |  |  |  |  | vn hurt-40.8.3-2 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer they=Patient |

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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:everyday:204-pranks.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): R5-strong ×1, R8-pos-agree ×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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- ← previous: [Pranks: harmless fun or real harm?, 23](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/204-pranks/23/)
- next →: [Pranks: harmless fun or real harm?, 25](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/204-pranks/25/)
- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/204-pranks/)