Rice, maize and potatoes: the plants that feed the world, sentence 16

Maize came from teosinte, a wild grass of Mexico whose ear held only about a dozen hard kernels; farmers changed it over thousands of years by keeping seed from their best plants.

Who acts: Maize, ear, farmers · What happens: come, hold, change, keep · To what, where: teosinte, dozen hard kernels, kernel, thousands, seed, best plants

This is a sentence of the lesson «Rice, maize and potatoes: the plants that feed the world» 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 (Maize, ear, farmers), 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	Maize	maize	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 came	nsubj
2	came	come	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	from	from	ADP	_	4 teosinte	case
4	teosinte	teosinte	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 came	obl
5	,	,	PUNCT	_	8 grass	punct
6	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	8 grass	det
7	wild	wild	ADJ	Degree=Pos	8 grass	amod
8	grass	grass	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 teosinte	appos
9	of	of	ADP	_	10 Mexico	case
10	Mexico	Mexico	PROPN	Number=Sing	8 grass	nmod
11	whose	whose	PRON	Poss=Yes PronType=Rel	12 ear	nmod:poss
12	ear	ear	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 held	nsubj
13	held	hold	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	8 grass	acl:relcl
14	only	only	ADV	_	17 dozen	advmod
15	about	about	ADV	_	17 dozen	advmod
16	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	17 dozen	det
17	dozen	dozen	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	19 kernels	nummod
18	hard	hard	ADJ	Degree=Pos	19 kernels	amod
19	kernels	kernel	NOUN	Number=Plur	13 held	obj
20	;	;	PUNCT	_	22 changed	punct
21	farmers	farmer	NOUN	Number=Plur	22 changed	nsubj
22	changed	change	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 came	parataxis
23	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	22 changed	obj
24	over	over	ADP	_	25 thousands	case
25	thousands	thousand	NOUN	Number=Plur	22 changed	obl
26	of	of	ADP	_	27 years	case
27	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	25 thousands	nmod
28	by	by	SCONJ	_	29 keeping	mark
29	keeping	keep	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	22 changed	advcl
30	seed	seed	NOUN	Number=Sing	29 keeping	obj
31	from	from	ADP	_	34 plants	case
32	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	34 plants	nmod:poss
33	best	good	ADJ	Degree=Sup	34 plants	amod
34	plants	plant	NOUN	Number=Plur	29 keeping	obl
35	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 came	punct

Pragmatics

form: statement
act: assert
voice: narrator
polarity: none
teacher: kept the draft

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	roles by
1	come	past	Maize		teosinte	vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V PP.initial_location»: agent=Theme from teosinte=Initial_Location
2	hold	past	ear	dozen hard kernels		vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent kernel=Theme
3	change	past	farmers	kernel	thousands of years	vn dress-41.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Patient
4	keep	gerund	farmers not said here	seed	Maize's best plants	vn forbid-64.4 «NP V NP PP.theme»: agent=Causer seed=Beneficiary from plant=Eventuality

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:345-rice-maize-and-potatoes-the-plants-that-feed-the-world.lesson:16.

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): R5-strong ×2, R7-rel-agree ×2. 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/345-rice-maize-and-potatoes-the-plants-that-feed-the-world/16/