---
title: A snake flicks its tongue to pick up smells from the air. — Fish, frogs and reptiles · tree and pragmatics
description: A snake flicks its tongue to pick up smells from the air. Who acts: snake. A sentence of the lesson «Fish, frogs and reptiles» of the world course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Fish, frogs and reptiles, sentence 19

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
A snake flicks its tongue to pick up smells from the air.

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**Who acts:** snake · **What happens:** flick, pick up · **To what, where:** tongue, smells, air

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Fish, frogs and reptiles» 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 (snake), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:world:074-fish-frogs-reptiles.lesson:19
# text = A snake flicks its tongue to pick up smells from the air.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = world
# lesson = 074-fish-frogs-reptiles.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	snake	snake	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	flicks	flick	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	tongue	tongue	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	_
6	to	to	PART	TO	_	7	mark	_	_
7	pick	pick	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	advcl	_	_
8	up	up	ADP	RP	_	7	compound:prt	_	_
9	smells	smell	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	obj	_	_
10	from	from	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
11	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	air	air	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obl	_	_
13	.	.	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 | **flick** | present | a snake | snake's tongue |  |  |  |  | vn throw-17.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent tongue=Theme |
| 2 | **pick up** | to-infinitive | a snake *not said here* | smells |  | the air |  |  | vn discover-84-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent smell=Topic |

<!-- .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:074-fish-frogs-reptiles.lesson:19`.

**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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