---
title: A muscle can only pull; it cannot push. — The skeleton and muscles · tree and pragmatics
description: A muscle can only pull; it cannot push. Who acts: muscle, cord. A sentence of the lesson «The skeleton and muscles» of the world course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The skeleton and muscles, sentence 14

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
A muscle can only pull; it cannot push.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** muscle, cord · **What happens:** pull, not push

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of the lesson «The skeleton and muscles» 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 (muscle, cord), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:world:031-skeleton-and-muscles.lesson:14
# text = A muscle can only pull; it cannot push.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = world
# lesson = 031-skeleton-and-muscles.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	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	muscle	muscle	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
3	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	only	only	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
5	pull	pull	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
6	;	;	PUNCT	:	_	10	punct	_	_
7	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
8	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	10	aux	_	_
9	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	10	advmod	_	_
10	push	push	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	parataxis	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	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 | **pull** | can | a muscle |  |  |  |  |  | vn slide-11.2 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **not** **push** | can | cord |  |  |  |  |  | vn push-12-1-1 «NP V PP»: agent=Agent |

<!-- .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:031-skeleton-and-muscles.lesson:14`.

**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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