City birds: sparrows, starlings, swifts, crows and peregrines on tall buildings, sentence 5

In London sparrow numbers fell by about two-thirds in a few decades, and scientists still argue why.

Who acts: London sparrow numbers, scientists · What happens: fall, argue

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 (London sparrow numbers, scientists), 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	In	in	ADP	_	4 numbers	case
2	London	London	PROPN	Number=Sing	4 numbers	compound
3	sparrow	sparrow	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 numbers	compound
4	numbers	number	NOUN	Number=Plur	5 fell	nsubj
5	fell	fall	VERB	Mood=Ind Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
6	by	by	ADP	_	10 thirds	case
7	about	about	ADV	_	8 two	advmod
8	two	two	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	10 thirds	nummod
9	-	-	PUNCT	_	8 two	punct
10	thirds	third	NOUN	Number=Plur	5 fell	obl
11	in	in	ADP	_	14 decades	case
12	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	14 decades	det
13	few	few	ADJ	Degree=Pos	14 decades	amod
14	decades	decade	NOUN	Number=Plur	5 fell	obl
15	,	,	PUNCT	_	19 argue	punct
16	and	and	CCONJ	_	19 argue	cc
17	scientists	scientist	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 argue	nsubj
18	still	still	ADV	_	19 argue	advmod
19	argue	argue	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	5 fell	conj
20	why	why	ADV	PronType=Int	19 argue	advmod
21	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 fell	punct

Pragmatics

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

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	fall	past	London sparrow numbers				decade	by two thirds	vn occur-48.3 «NP V PP»: agent=Theme by third=Location
2	argue speech: disagree	present	scientists				still		vn correspond-36.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent

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:5.

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. 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/5/