---
title: “Don’t snuff at my ankles, or I’ll kick at you. — The Jungle Book · tree and pragmatics
description: “Don’t snuff at my ankles, or I’ll kick at you. Who acts: you, dog. A sentence of «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, part 20, 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/pg236/20/53/)

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# The Jungle Book, The Jungle Book, part 20, sentence 53

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“Don’t snuff at my ankles, or I’ll kick at you.

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**Who acts:** you, dog · **What happens:** not snuff, kick · **To what, where:** ankles

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This is a sentence of «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, part 20. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (you, dog), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg236:2335`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg236:20:53
# text = “Don’t snuff at my ankles, or I’ll kick at you.
1	“	"	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	_
2	Do	do	AUX	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	n’t	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
4	snuff	snuff	VERB	VB	Mood=Imp|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	at	at	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	my	my	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Sing|Person=1|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	7	nmod:poss	_	_
7	ankles	ankle	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obl	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
9	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
10	I	I	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Sing|Person=1|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
11	’ll	will	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
12	kick	kick	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	conj	_	_
13	at	at	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
14	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	12	obl	_	_
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **snuff** *in a quote* | imperative · do-support | you *not said here* |  |  | my ankles |  |  | vn hiccup-40.1.1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **kick** *in a quote* | future | dog |  |  |  |  | at you | vn swat-18.2 «NP V PP»: agent=Agent at you=Patient |

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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:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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