---
title: A cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds' nests and lets them raise its… — Birds: feathers, nests and flight · tree and pragmatics
description: A cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds' nests and lets them raise its chicks. Who acts: cuckoo, eggs. 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 18

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
A cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds' nests and lets them raise its chicks.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** cuckoo, eggs · **What happens:** lay, let, raise · **To what, where:** eggs, nests, chicks

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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 (cuckoo, eggs), 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:18
# text = A cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds' nests and lets them raise its chicks.
# 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	cuckoo	cuckoo	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	lays	lay	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	its	its	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	5	nmod:poss	_	_
5	eggs	egg	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obj	_	_
6	in	in	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
7	other	other	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	birds	bird	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	nmod:poss	_	_
9	'	's	PART	POS	_	8	case	_	_
10	nests	nest	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obl	_	_
11	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
12	lets	let	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	_
13	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	obj	_	_
14	raise	raise	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	12	xcomp	_	_
15	its	its	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	16	nmod:poss	_	_
16	chicks	chick	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	obj	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	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 | **lay** | present | a cuckoo | cuckoo's eggs |  | other birds's nests |  |  | vn put\_spatial-9.2 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent egg=Theme in nest=Destination |
| 2 | **let** | present | a cuckoo *not said here* | eggs *= egg* |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **raise** | infinitive | eggs *= egg* *not said here* | bird's chicks |  |  |  |  | vn put\_direction-9.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent chick=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:18`.

**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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- ← previous: [Birds: feathers, nests and flight, 17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/world/73-birds-feathers-nests-flight/17/)
- next →: [Birds: feathers, nests and flight, 19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/world/73-birds-feathers-nests-flight/19/)
- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/world/73-birds-feathers-nests-flight/)