---
title: If prey animals increase too much, they can eat too many plants and… — Balance in a food web · tree and pragmatics
description: If prey animals increase too much, they can eat too many plants and harm the whole habitat. Who acts: prey animals, predators. A sentence of the lesson «Balance in a food web» of the world course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Balance in a food web, sentence 10

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
If prey animals increase too much, they can eat too many plants and harm the whole habitat.

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**Who acts:** prey animals, predators · **What happens:** increase, eat, harm · **To what, where:** much, many plants, whole habitat

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Balance in a food web» 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 (prey animals, predators), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:world:030-balance-in-food-webs.lesson:10
# text = If prey animals increase too much, they can eat too many plants and harm the whole habitat.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = world
# lesson = 030-balance-in-food-webs.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	If	if	SCONJ	IN	_	4	mark	_	_
2	prey	prey	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	compound	_	_
3	animals	animal	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
4	increase	increase	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	10	advcl	_	_
5	too	too	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
6	much	much	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	obj	_	_
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	4	punct	_	_
8	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
9	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	10	aux	_	_
10	eat	eat	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
11	too	too	ADV	RB	_	12	advmod	_	_
12	many	many	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	amod	_	_
13	plants	plant	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	obj	_	_
14	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	15	cc	_	_
15	harm	harm	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	conj	_	_
16	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	18	det	_	_
17	whole	whole	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	18	amod	_	_
18	habitat	habitat	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	15	obj	_	_
19	.	.	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 | **increase** *a condition, not said to happen* | present | prey animals | much |  |  |  |  | vn caused\_calibratable\_cos-45.6.2-1 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Causer much=Patient |
| 2 | **eat** | can | predators *= predator* | many plants |  |  |  |  | vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent plant=Patient |
| 3 | **harm** | infinitive | predators *= predator* *not said here* | the whole habitat |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus habitat=Experiencer |

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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:world:030-balance-in-food-webs.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): 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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