---
title: Porcupines can't shoot their quills; the quills come loose easily wh… — Wild animals and tall tales · tree and pragmatics
description: Porcupines can't shoot their quills; the quills come loose easily when touched and stick into an attacker. Who acts: Porcupines, quills. A sentence of the lesson «Wild animals and tall tales» of the myths course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Wild animals and tall tales, sentence 10

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Porcupines can't shoot their quills; the quills come loose easily when touched and stick into an attacker.

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**Who acts:** Porcupines, quills · **What happens:** not shoot, come, touch, stick · **To what, where:** quills, attacker

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Wild animals and tall tales» of the myths 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 (Porcupines, quills), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:myths:008-wild-animals-and-tall-tales.lesson:10
# text = Porcupines can't shoot their quills; the quills come loose easily when touched and stick into an attacker.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = myths
# lesson = 008-wild-animals-and-tall-tales.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, R7-rel-agree ×1
1	Porcupines	porcupine	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
2	ca	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	n't	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	shoot	shoot	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
6	quills	quill	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	_
7	;	;	PUNCT	:	_	10	punct	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	quills	quill	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	nsubj	_	_
10	come	come	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	parataxis	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=4:conj|HaikuPos=VERB:VB:VerbForm=Inf
11	loose	loose	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=12:advmod
12	easily	easily	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
13	when	when	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	14	advmod	_	_
14	touched	touch	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	10	advcl	_	_
15	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	16	cc	_	_
16	stick	stick	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	conj	_	_
17	into	into	ADP	IN	_	19	case	_	_
18	an	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	19	det	_	_
19	attacker	attacker	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	16	obl	_	_
20	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	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 | **not** **shoot** | can | Porcupines | Porcupines's quills |  |  |  |  | vn throw-17.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent quill=Theme |
| 2 | **come** | present | the quills |  |  |  |  | easily, loose *property* | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 3 | **touch** | participle | the quills *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn contiguous\_location-47.8-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 4 | **stick** | infinitive | the quills *not said here* |  |  | a attacker |  |  | vn spray-9.7-1 «NP V PP.destination»: agent=Theme into attacker=Destination |

<!-- .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:myths:008-wild-animals-and-tall-tales.lesson:10`.

**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, R7-rel-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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