---
title: A hummingbird can hover by beating its wings dozens of times a second. — Birds: feathers, nests and flight · tree and pragmatics
description: A hummingbird can hover by beating its wings dozens of times a second. Who acts: hummingbird. A sentence of the lesson «Birds: feathers, nests and flight» of the world course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Birds: feathers, nests and flight, sentence 14

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A hummingbird can hover by beating its wings dozens of times a second.

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**Who acts:** hummingbird · **What happens:** hover, beat · **To what, where:** wings

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Birds: feathers, nests and flight» 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 (hummingbird), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:world:073-birds-feathers-nests-flight.lesson:14
# text = A hummingbird can hover by beating its wings dozens of times a second.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = world
# lesson = 073-birds-feathers-nests-flight.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	hummingbird	hummingbird	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
3	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
4	hover	hover	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	by	by	SCONJ	IN	_	6	mark	_	_
6	beating	beat	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	4	advcl	_	_
7	its	its	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	wings	wing	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obj	_	_
9	dozens	dozen	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obl:unmarked	_	_
10	of	of	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	times	time	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	9	nmod	_	_
12	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	second	second	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	nmod:unmarked	_	_
14	.	.	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 | **hover** | can | a hummingbird |  |  |  |  |  | vn modes\_of\_being\_with\_motion-47.3 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **beat** | gerund | a hummingbird *not said here* | hummingbird's wings |  |  |  | dozens of times  a second *obl:unmarked* | vn sound\_emission-43.2 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location wing=Theme |

<!-- .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:073-birds-feathers-nests-flight.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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