---
title: Ears pinned flat back often mean fear; ears pushed stiffly forward c… — Reading a dog's body language · tree and pragmatics
description: Ears pinned flat back often mean fear; ears pushed stiffly forward can mean the dog is on alert. Who acts: Ears, dog. A sentence of the lesson «Reading a dog's body language» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Reading a dog's body language, sentence 13

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Ears pinned flat back often mean fear; ears pushed stiffly forward can mean the dog is on alert.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** Ears, dog · **What happens:** pin back, mean, push, be · **To what, where:** Ears, fear, alert · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Reading a dog's body language» 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 (Ears, dog), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:021-reading-a-dog.lesson:13
# text = Ears pinned flat back often mean fear; ears pushed stiffly forward can mean the dog is on alert.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 021-reading-a-dog.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, R6-punct-agree ×1
1	Ears	ear	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
2	pinned	pin	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	1	acl	_	_
3	flat	flat	ADV	RB	_	2	advmod	_	_
4	back	back	ADV	RB	_	2	advmod	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=5:advmod
5	often	often	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
6	mean	mean	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	14	parataxis	_	_
7	fear	fear	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	_
8	;	;	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
9	ears	ear	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	nsubj	_	_
10	pushed	push	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	9	acl	_	_
11	stiffly	stiffly	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
12	forward	forward	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
13	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	14	aux	_	_
14	mean	mean	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
15	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
16	dog	dog	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	19	nsubj	_	_
17	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	19	cop	_	_
18	on	on	ADP	IN	_	19	case	_	_
19	alert	alert	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	14	ccomp	_	_
20	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=14:punct
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- sa -->
- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **pin back** | participle |  | Ears *not said here* |  |  |  | flat *property* | vn tape-22.4 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Patient |
| 2 | **mean** | present | Ears | fear |  |  |  | often *property* | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent fear=Topic |
| 3 | **push** | participle |  | ears *not said here* |  |  |  | forward, stiffly *property* | vn push-12-1-1 «NP V PP»: agent=Agent |
| 4 | **mean** | can | ears |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent |
| 5 | **is** | present | the dog |  |  | alert |  |  | tree rules |

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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:021-reading-a-dog.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): R5-strong ×1, R6-punct-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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