---
title: If a prey animal disappears, the predators that ate it must find oth… — Balance in a food web · tree and pragmatics
description: If a prey animal disappears, the predators that ate it must find other food, move away or decline. Who acts: prey animal, 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 11

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
If a prey animal disappears, the predators that ate it must find other food, move away or decline.

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**Who acts:** prey animal, predators · **What happens:** disappear, eat, find, move away, decline · **To what, where:** animal, other food

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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 animal, 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:11
# text = If a prey animal disappears, the predators that ate it must find other food, move away or decline.
# 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	_	5	mark	_	_
2	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	prey	prey	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	compound	_	_
4	animal	animal	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
5	disappears	disappear	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	13	advcl	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	predators	predator	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	13	nsubj	_	_
9	that	that	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	10	nsubj	_	_
10	ate	eat	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	8	acl:relcl	_	_
11	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	obj	_	_
12	must	must	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	13	aux	_	_
13	find	find	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
14	other	other	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	15	amod	_	_
15	food	food	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	obj	_	_
16	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	17	punct	_	_
17	move	move	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	13	conj	_	_
18	away	away	ADV	RB	_	17	advmod	_	_
19	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	20	cc	_	_
20	decline	decline	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	17	conj	_	_
21	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	13	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: narrate
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **disappear** *a condition, not said to happen* | present | a prey animal |  |  |  |  |  | vn disappearance-48.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **eat** | past | the predators | animal |  |  |  |  | vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Patient |
| 3 | **find** | must | the predators | other food |  |  |  |  | vn discover-84 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent food=Topic |
| 4 | **move away** | infinitive | the predators *not said here* |  |  |  |  | away *property* | vn roll-51.3.1 «NP.theme V»: agent=Theme |
| 5 | **decline** | infinitive | the predators *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn calibratable\_cos-45.6.1-1 «NP.attribute V»: agent=Attribute |

<!-- .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:030-balance-in-food-webs.lesson:11`.

**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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