---
title: Food chains rarely have more than four or five steps, because too li… — Balance in a food web · tree and pragmatics
description: Food chains rarely have more than four or five steps, because too little energy is left at the top. Who acts: Food chains. 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 8

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Food chains rarely have more than four or five steps, because too little energy is left at the top.

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**Who acts:** Food chains · **What happens:** have, leave · **To what, where:** four steps, little energy, top

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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 (Food chains), 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:8
# text = Food chains rarely have more than four or five steps, because too little energy is left at the top.
# 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): R1-cc-next ×1, R5-strong ×2
1	Food	food	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	compound	_	_
2	chains	chain	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
3	rarely	rarely	ADV	RB	_	4	advmod	_	_
4	have	have	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	more	more	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	7	advmod	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=4:obj
6	than	than	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
7	four	four	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	10	nummod	_	_
8	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	Agree=R1-cc-next|Haiku=7:cc
9	five	five	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	7	conj	_	_
10	steps	step	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=5:obl
11	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	17	punct	_	_
12	because	because	SCONJ	IN	_	17	mark	_	_
13	too	too	ADV	RB	_	14	advmod	_	_
14	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	15	amod	_	_
15	energy	energy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	17	nsubj:pass	_	_
16	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	17	aux:pass	_	_
17	left	leave	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	4	advcl	_	_
18	at	at	ADP	IN	_	20	case	_	_
19	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	20	det	_	_
20	top	top	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	17	obl	_	_
21	.	.	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 | **have** | present | Food chains | four steps |  |  |  | rarely *property* | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent step=Patient |
| 2 | **leave** | present · passive |  | little energy |  | the top |  |  | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP PP.location»: subject=Theme at top=Location |

<!-- .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:8`.

**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 ×1, R5-strong ×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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