---
title: ‘But it’s straining your back-plates a little. — Just so stories · tree and pragmatics
description: ‘But it’s straining your back-plates a little. Who acts: exercise. A sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, The Beginning of the Armadillos, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Just so stories, The Beginning of the Armadillos, sentence 119

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‘But it’s straining your back-plates a little.

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**Who acts:** exercise · **What happens:** strain · **To what, where:** back plates

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This is a sentence of «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, The Beginning of the Armadillos. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (exercise), 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:pg2781:403`): 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:pg2781:8:119
# text = ‘But it’s straining your back-plates a little.
1	‘	'	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	_
2	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	5	cc	_	_
3	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
4	’s	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
5	straining	strain	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
6	your	your	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	9	nmod:poss	_	_
7	back	back	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	compound	_	_
8	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	7	punct	_	_
9	plates	plate	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	obj	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	obl:unmarked	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **strain** | present · progressive | exercise | your back plates |  |  |  | a little *obl:unmarked* | vn wipe\_manner-10.4.1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent plate=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:** «Just so stories» by Rudyard Kipling, Project Gutenberg book 2781 (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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