---
title: Never touch or test an electric fence; you cannot tell by looking wh… — Bets, dares and silly reasons · tree and pragmatics
description: Never touch or test an electric fence; you cannot tell by looking whether it is on. Who acts: you, fence. A sentence of the lesson «Bets, dares and silly reasons» of the world course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Bets, dares and silly reasons, sentence 13

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Never touch or test an electric fence; you cannot tell by looking whether it is on.

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**Who acts:** you, fence · **What happens:** not touch, test, not tell, look, be · **To what, where:** electric fence · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Bets, dares and silly reasons» of the world 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, fence), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:world:169-bets-dares-and-silly-reasons.lesson:13
# text = Never touch or test an electric fence; you cannot tell by looking whether it is on.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = world
# lesson = 169-bets-dares-and-silly-reasons.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): R7-rel-agree ×1
1	Never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	2	advmod	_	_
2	touch	touch	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	_
4	test	test	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
5	an	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
6	electric	electric	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	fence	fence	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
8	;	;	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
9	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Person=2|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
10	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
11	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	12	advmod	_	_
12	tell	tell	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	parataxis	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=2:conj
13	by	by	SCONJ	IN	_	14	mark	_	_
14	looking	look	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	12	advcl	_	_
15	whether	whether	SCONJ	IN	_	18	mark	_	_
16	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	18	nsubj	_	_
17	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	18	cop	_	_
18	on	on	ADV	RB	_	14	ccomp	_	_
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	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** **touch** | imperative | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn contiguous\_location-47.8-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **test** | infinitive | you *not said here* | a electric fence |  |  |  |  | vn assessment-34.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent fence=Theme |
| 3 | **not** **tell** *speech: assert* | can | you |  |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 4 | **look** | gerund | you *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn stimulus\_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus |
| 5 | **is** | present | fence |  |  |  |  | on *property* | tree rules |

<!-- .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:world:169-bets-dares-and-silly-reasons.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): 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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