City birds: sparrows, starlings, swifts, crows and peregrines on tall buildings, sentence 7

Tens of thousands of starlings fly together before roosting in shapes called murmurations; each bird watches about 7 nearest neighbours, and a falcon finds it hard to pick one bird out.

Who acts: Tens, shapes, bird, falcon · What happens: fly, roost, call, watch, find, pick out · To what, where: shapes, murmurations, 7 nearest neighbours, one bird · Speech: someone speaks here

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 (Tens, shapes, bird, falcon), 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	Tens	ten	NOUN	Number=Plur	6 fly	nsubj
2	of	of	ADP	_	3 thousands	case
3	thousands	thousand	NOUN	Number=Plur	1 Tens	nmod
4	of	of	ADP	_	5 starlings	case
5	starlings	starling	NOUN	Number=Plur	3 thousands	nmod
6	fly	fly	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
7	together	together	ADV	_	6 fly	advmod
8	before	before	SCONJ	_	9 roosting	mark
9	roosting	roost	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	6 fly	advcl
10	in	in	ADP	_	11 shapes	case
11	shapes	shape	NOUN	Number=Plur	9 roosting	obl
12	called	call	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	11 shapes	acl
13	murmurations	murmuration	NOUN	Number=Plur	12 called	xcomp
14	;	;	PUNCT	_	17 watches	punct
15	each	each	DET	PronType=Tot	16 bird	det
16	bird	bird	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 watches	nsubj
17	watches	watch	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	6 fly	parataxis
18	about	about	ADV	_	19 7	advmod
19	7	7	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	21 neighbours	nummod
20	nearest	near	ADJ	Degree=Sup	21 neighbours	amod
21	neighbours	neighbour	NOUN	Number=Plur	17 watches	obj
22	,	,	PUNCT	_	26 finds	punct
23	and	and	CCONJ	_	26 finds	cc
24	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	25 falcon	det
25	falcon	falcon	NOUN	Number=Sing	26 finds	nsubj
26	finds	find	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	17 watches	conj
27	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	28 hard	expl
28	hard	hard	ADJ	Degree=Pos	26 finds	xcomp
29	to	to	PART	_	30 pick	mark
30	pick	pick	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	28 hard	advcl
31	one	one	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	32 bird	nummod
32	bird	bird	NOUN	Number=Sing	30 pick	obj
33	out	out	ADP	_	30 pick	compound:prt
34	.	.	PUNCT	_	6 fly	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	fly	present	Tens of thousands of starlings			together property	vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	roost	gerund	Tens of thousands of starlings not said here		shapes		vn spatial_configuration-47.6 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme in shape=Location
3	call	participle	shapes not said here	murmurations			vn initiate_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
4	watch	present	each bird	7 nearest neighbours			vn assessment-34.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent neighbour=Theme
5	find	present	a falcon			hard property	vn declare-29.4-1-1 «NP V what S_INF»: agent=Agent
6	pick out	to-infinitive	a falcon not said here	one bird			vn chew-39.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent bird=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:7.

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/369-city-birds-sparrows-starlings-swifts-crows-and-peregrines-on-tall-buildings/7/