---
title: Snakes smell by flicking their tongue to pick up scents from the air. — Senses of animals: how they see, hear and smell · tree and pragmatics
description: Snakes smell by flicking their tongue to pick up scents from the air. Who acts: Snakes. A sentence of the lesson «Senses of animals: how they see, hear and smell» of the world course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Senses of animals: how they see, hear and smell, sentence 12

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Snakes smell by flicking their tongue to pick up scents from the air.

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**Who acts:** Snakes · **What happens:** smell, flick, pick up · **To what, where:** tongue, scents, air

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Senses of animals: how they see, hear and smell» 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 (Snakes), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:world:079-senses-of-animals.lesson:12
# text = Snakes smell by flicking their tongue to pick up scents from the air.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = world
# lesson = 079-senses-of-animals.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	Snakes	snake	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	smell	smell	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	by	by	SCONJ	IN	_	4	mark	_	_
4	flicking	flick	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	2	advcl	_	_
5	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	6	nmod:poss	_	_
6	tongue	tongue	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
7	to	to	PART	TO	_	8	mark	_	_
8	pick	pick	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	advcl	_	_
9	up	up	ADP	RP	_	8	compound:prt	_	_
10	scents	scent	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obj	_	_
11	from	from	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
12	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	air	air	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nmod	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **smell** | present | Snakes |  |  |  |  |  | vn smell\_emission-43.3 «NP.location V»: agent=Location |
| 2 | **flick** | gerund | Snakes *not said here* | Snakes's tongue |  |  |  |  | vn throw-17.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent tongue=Theme |
| 3 | **pick up** | to-infinitive | Snakes *not said here* | scents |  | the air |  |  | vn discover-84-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent scent=Topic |

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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:079-senses-of-animals.lesson:12`.

**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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