---
title: But do cats eat bats, I wonder?” — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · tree and pragmatics
description: But do cats eat bats, I wonder?” Who acts: cats, I. A sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter I. Down the Rabbit-Hole, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/2/39/)

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# Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter I. Down the Rabbit-Hole, sentence 39

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
But do cats eat bats, I wonder?”

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** cats, I · **What happens:** eat, wonder · **To what, where:** bats

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter I. Down the Rabbit-Hole. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (cats, I), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

<!-- .note-en -->
**Parsed by Mova, not checked by a teacher.** This tree is Mova's own parse (the `en` model, on the CPU, when the site is built); it may be wrong.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg11:2:39
# text = But do cats eat bats, I wonder?”
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	_
2	do	do	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	cats	cat	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
4	eat	eat	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	bats	bat	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
7	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
8	wonder	wonder	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	parataxis	_	SpaceAfter=No
9	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **eat** | present · do-support | cats | bats |  |  |  |  | vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent bat=Patient |
| 2 | **wonder** *speech: ask* | present | I |  |  |  |  |  | vn care-88.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer |

<!-- .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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**Text:** «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Project Gutenberg book 11 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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- ← previous: [sentence 38](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/2/38/)
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- ↑ back to [Chapter I. Down the Rabbit-Hole](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/2/)