---
title: Biting nails and picking the skin around them can let germs in and c… — Hair, nails and ears · tree and pragmatics
description: Biting nails and picking the skin around them can let germs in and cause painful infections. Who acts: Biting. A sentence of the lesson «Hair, nails and ears» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Hair, nails and ears, sentence 22

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Biting nails and picking the skin around them can let germs in and cause painful infections.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** Biting · **What happens:** bite, pick, let in, cause · **To what, where:** nails, skin, germs, painful infections

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Hair, nails and ears» 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 (Biting), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:077-hair-nails-and-ears.lesson:22
# text = Biting nails and picking the skin around them can let germs in and cause painful infections.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 077-hair-nails-and-ears.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	Biting	bite	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	10	csubj	_	_
2	nails	nail	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	1	obj	_	_
3	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	Agree=R1-cc-next|Haiku=1:cc
4	picking	pick	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	1	conj	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	skin	skin	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
7	around	around	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	4	obl	_	_
9	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	10	aux	_	_
10	let	let	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
11	germs	germ	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	obj	_	_
12	in	in	ADP	RP	_	10	compound:prt	_	_
13	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	14	cc	_	Agree=R1-cc-next|Haiku=10:cc
14	cause	cause	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	conj	_	_
15	painful	painful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	16	amod	_	_
16	infections	infection	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	obj	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **bite** | gerund |  | nails |  |  |  |  | vn swat-18.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent nail=Patient |
| 2 | **pick** | gerund |  | the skin |  |  |  | around nails *= nail* | vn chew-39.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent skin=Patient |
| 3 | **let in** | can | Biting | germs |  |  |  |  | vn give-13.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent germ=Theme |
| 4 | **cause** | infinitive | Biting *not said here* | painful infections |  |  |  |  | vn engender-27.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Precondition infection=Patient |

<!-- .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:077-hair-nails-and-ears.lesson:22`.

**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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