---
title: They may drop him if we follow too close.” — The Jungle Book · tree and pragmatics
description: They may drop him if we follow too close.” Who acts: Teacher, we. A sentence of «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, part 5, 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/pg236/5/35/)

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# The Jungle Book, The Jungle Book, part 5, sentence 35

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They may drop him if we follow too close.”

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**Who acts:** Teacher, we · **What happens:** drop, follow · **To what, where:** Bagheera

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This is a sentence of «The Jungle Book» by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, part 5. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Teacher, we), 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:pg236:5:35
# text = They may drop him if we follow too close.”
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	may	may	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	drop	drop	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	him	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	obj	_	_
5	if	if	SCONJ	IN	_	7	mark	_	_
6	we	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
7	follow	follow	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	3	advcl	_	_
8	too	too	ADV	RB	_	9	advmod	_	_
9	close	close	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	advcl	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	SpaceAfter=No
11	”	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **drop** | may | Teacher | Bagheera |  |  |  |  | vn put\_direction-9.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent he=Theme |
| 2 | **follow** *a condition, not said to happen* | present | we |  |  |  |  |  | vn occur-48.3-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

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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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