---
title: Matkah knew better than to answer back. — The Jungle Book · tree and pragmatics
description: Matkah knew better than to answer back. Who acts: Matkah. A sentence of «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, part 10, 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/pg236/10/125/)

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# The Jungle Book, The Jungle Book, part 10, sentence 125

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Matkah knew better than to answer back.

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**Who acts:** Matkah · **What happens:** know, answer back

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This is a sentence of «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, part 10. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Matkah), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**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:pg236:10:125
# text = Matkah knew better than to answer back.
1	Matkah	Matkah	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	knew	know	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	better	well	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	2	advmod	_	_
4	than	than	SCONJ	IN	_	6	mark	_	_
5	to	to	PART	TO	_	6	mark	_	_
6	answer	answer	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	advcl	_	_
7	back	back	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **know** | past | Matkah |  |  |  |  | well *property* | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer |
| 2 | **answer back** *speech: assert* | to-infinitive | Matkah *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn reciprocate-112-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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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**Text:** «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, Project Gutenberg book 236 (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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