---
title: Never poke your fingers into a bird's cage: a parrot's beak can bite… — The cat that only likes Dad, and other choosy pets · tree and pragmatics
description: Never poke your fingers into a bird's cage: a parrot's beak can bite badly. Who acts: you, beak. A sentence of the lesson «The cat that only likes Dad, and other choosy pets» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The cat that only likes Dad, and other choosy pets, sentence 26

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Never poke your fingers into a bird's cage: a parrot's beak can bite badly.

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**Who acts:** you, beak · **What happens:** not poke, bite · **To what, where:** fingers

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This is a sentence of the lesson «The cat that only likes Dad, and other choosy pets» 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 (you, beak), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:457-the-cat-that-only-likes-dad-and-other-choosy-pets.lesson:26
# text = Never poke your fingers into a bird's cage: a parrot's beak can bite badly.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 457-the-cat-that-only-likes-dad-and-other-choosy-pets.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	Never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	2	advmod	_	_
2	poke	poke	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	your	your	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	4	nmod:poss	_	_
4	fingers	finger	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obj	_	_
5	into	into	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	bird	bird	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nmod:poss	_	_
8	's	's	PART	POS	_	7	case	_	_
9	cage	cage	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	_
10	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	16	punct	_	_
11	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	parrot	parrot	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	14	nmod:poss	_	_
13	's	's	PART	POS	_	12	case	_	_
14	beak	beak	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	16	nsubj	_	_
15	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	16	aux	_	_
16	bite	bite	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	parataxis	_	_
17	badly	badly	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	16	advmod	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- sa -->
- form: command
- act: warn
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: changed act=warn

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **poke** | imperative | you *not said here* | your fingers |  |  |  | into a bird's cage | vn poke-19-1-1-1 «NP V NP PP.patient»: agent=Agent finger=Instrument into cage=Patient |
| 2 | **bite** | can | a parrot's beak |  |  |  |  | badly *property* | vn swat-18.2 «NP V PP»: agent=Agent |

<!-- .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:everyday:457-the-cat-that-only-likes-dad-and-other-choosy-pets.lesson:26`.

**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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