---
title: A trapped or cornered animal is much more likely to bite or scratch. — Thinking like an animal · tree and pragmatics
description: A trapped or cornered animal is much more likely to bite or scratch. Who acts: trapped animal. A sentence of the lesson «Thinking like an animal» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Thinking like an animal, sentence 21

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A trapped or cornered animal is much more likely to bite or scratch.

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**Who acts:** trapped animal · **What happens:** trap, corner, be, bite, scratch

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Thinking like an animal» 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 (trapped animal), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:030-thinking-like-an-animal.lesson:21
# text = A trapped or cornered animal is much more likely to bite or scratch.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 030-thinking-like-an-animal.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): R1-cc-next ×2
1	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
2	trapped	trap	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	5	amod	_	_
3	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	Agree=R1-cc-next|Haiku=2:cc
4	cornered	corner	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	2	conj	_	_
5	animal	animal	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
6	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	cop	_	_
7	much	much	ADV	RB	_	8	advmod	_	_
8	more	more	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	9	advmod	_	_
9	likely	likely	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
10	to	to	PART	TO	_	11	mark	_	_
11	bite	bite	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	9	xcomp	_	_
12	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	13	cc	_	Agree=R1-cc-next|Haiku=11:cc
13	scratch	scratch	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	11	conj	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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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 | **trap** | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn trick-59.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **corner** | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **is** | present | a trapped animal |  |  |  |  | likely *property* | tree rules |
| 4 | **bite** | to-infinitive | a trapped animal *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn swat-18.2 «NP V PP»: agent=Agent |
| 5 | **scratch** | infinitive | a trapped animal *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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:030-thinking-like-an-animal.lesson:21`.

**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): R1-cc-next ×2. **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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