City birds: sparrows, starlings, swifts, crows and peregrines on tall buildings, sentence 2

Stand on a bridge at dusk in winter and watch a cloud of starlings twist like smoke: no bird is in charge, each one just copies the few birds closest to it.

Who acts: you, cloud, bird, one · What happens: stand, watch, twist, be, copy, cloud · To what, where: bridge, cloud, charge, few birds, starlings

This is a sentence of the lesson «City birds: sparrows, starlings, swifts, crows and peregrines on tall buildings» 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 (you, cloud, bird, one), 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	Stand	stand	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
2	on	on	ADP	_	4 bridge	case
3	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	4 bridge	det
4	bridge	bridge	NOUN	Number=Sing	1 Stand	obl
5	at	at	ADP	_	6 dusk	case
6	dusk	dusk	NOUN	Number=Sing	1 Stand	obl
7	in	in	ADP	_	8 winter	case
8	winter	winter	NOUN	Number=Sing	1 Stand	obl
9	and	and	CCONJ	_	10 watch	cc
10	watch	watch	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	1 Stand	conj
11	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	12 cloud	det
12	cloud	cloud	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 watch	obj
13	of	of	ADP	_	14 starlings	case
14	starlings	starling	NOUN	Number=Plur	12 cloud	nmod
15	twist	twist	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	12 cloud	acl
16	like	like	ADP	_	17 smoke	case
17	smoke	smoke	NOUN	Number=Sing	15 twist	obl
18	:	:	PUNCT	_	1 Stand	punct
19	no	no	DET	PronType=Neg	20 bird	det
20	bird	bird	NOUN	Number=Sing	23 charge	nsubj
21	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	23 charge	cop
22	in	in	ADP	_	23 charge	case
23	charge	charge	NOUN	Number=Sing	1 Stand	parataxis
24	,	,	PUNCT	_	28 copies	punct
25	each	each	DET	PronType=Tot	26 one	det
26	one	one	NOUN	Number=Sing	28 copies	nsubj
27	just	just	ADV	_	28 copies	advmod
28	copies	copy	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	23 charge	parataxis
29	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	31 birds	det
30	few	few	ADJ	Degree=Pos	31 birds	amod
31	birds	bird	NOUN	Number=Plur	28 copies	obj
32	closest	close	ADJ	Degree=Sup	31 birds	amod
33	to	to	ADP	_	34 it	case
34	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	32 closest	obl
35	.	.	PUNCT	_	1 Stand	punct

Pragmatics

form: command
act: request
voice: narrator
polarity: none
teacher: kept the draft

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	stand	imperative	you not said here		a bridge	dusk; winter		vn assuming_position-50 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent on bridge=Location
2	watch	infinitive	you not said here	a cloud of starlings				vn assessment-34.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent cloud=Theme
3	twist	infinitive	a cloud of starlings not said here				like smoke	vn roll-51.3.1 «NP.theme V»: agent=Theme
4	is	present	no bird		charge			tree rules
5	copy	present	each one	the few birds				vn scribble-25.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent bird=Theme
6	cloud			starlings				nom cloud «phenomenon transitive»: of=patient

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:369-city-birds-sparrows-starlings-swifts-crows-and-peregrines-on-tall-buildings.lesson:2.

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 ×1, 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/369-city-birds-sparrows-starlings-swifts-crows-and-peregrines-on-tall-buildings/2/