Natural selection we can watch: moths, finches, germs and tuskless elephants, sentence 0

Natural selection is usually slow, but sometimes we can watch it happen within a few years or decades, like a film on fast-forward.

Who acts: Natural selection, we, selection · What happens: be, watch, happen · To what, where: selection

This is a sentence of the lesson «Natural selection we can watch: moths, finches, germs and tuskless elephants» of the biology course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Natural selection, we, selection), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	Natural	natural	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 selection	amod
2	selection	selection	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 slow	nsubj
3	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	5 slow	cop
4	usually	usually	ADV	_	5 slow	advmod
5	slow	slow	ADJ	Degree=Pos	root	root
6	,	,	PUNCT	_	11 watch	punct
7	but	but	CCONJ	_	11 watch	cc
8	sometimes	sometimes	ADV	PronType=Ind	11 watch	advmod
9	we	we	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs	11 watch	nsubj
10	can	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	11 watch	aux
11	watch	watch	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	5 slow	conj
12	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	11 watch	obj
13	happen	happen	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	11 watch	xcomp
14	within	within	ADP	_	17 years	case
15	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	17 years	det
16	few	few	ADJ	Degree=Pos	17 years	amod
17	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	13 happen	obl
18	or	or	CCONJ	_	19 decades	cc
19	decades	decade	NOUN	Number=Plur	17 years	conj
20	,	,	PUNCT	_	23 film	punct
21	like	like	ADP	_	23 film	case
22	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	23 film	det
23	film	film	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 watch	parataxis
24	on	on	ADP	_	25 fast	case
25	fast	fast	ADJ	Degree=Pos	23 film	amod
26	-	-	PUNCT	_	25 fast	punct
27	forward	forward	ADV	_	25 fast	advmod
28	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 slow	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	when	other	roles by
1	is	present	Natural selection			slow, usually property	tree rules
2	watch	can	we	selection		sometimes property	tree rules
3	happen	infinitive	selection not said here		year		vn occur-48.3-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme

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.

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, mova-school-agreed-en.conllu) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence school:biology:279-natural-selection-we-can-watch-moths-finches-germs-and-tuskless-elephants.lesson:0.

The tree: Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R7-rel-agree ×1. The frames are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (prag) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the release 0.4.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/279-natural-selection-we-can-watch-moths-finches-germs-and-tuskless-elephants/0/