Evolution simply: why living things change over many generations, sentence 8
Whales are mammals whose ancestors walked on land about 50 million years ago; their back legs shrank to small hidden bones, and their closest living land relative is the hippopotamus.
Who acts: Whales, ancestors, back legs, closest living land relative · What happens: be, walk, shrink · To what, where: mammals, land, hippopotamus
This is a sentence of the lesson «Evolution simply: why living things change over many generations» 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 (Whales, ancestors, back legs, closest living land relative), 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 | Whales | whale | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 mammals | nsubj |
| 2 | are | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 3 mammals | cop |
| 3 | mammals | mammal | NOUN | Number=Plur | root | root |
| 4 | whose | whose | PRON | Poss=Yes PronType=Rel | 5 ancestors | nmod:poss |
| 5 | ancestors | ancestor | NOUN | Number=Plur | 6 walked | nsubj |
| 6 | walked | walk | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 mammals | acl:relcl |
| 7 | on | on | ADP | _ | 8 land | case |
| 8 | land | land | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 walked | obl |
| 9 | about | about | ADV | _ | 11 million | advmod |
| 10 | 50 | 50 | NUM | NumForm=Digit NumType=Card | 11 million | compound |
| 11 | million | million | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 12 years | nummod |
| 12 | years | year | NOUN | Number=Plur | 13 ago | obl:unmarked |
| 13 | ago | ago | ADV | _ | 6 walked | advmod |
| 14 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 18 shrank | punct |
| 15 | their | their | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 17 legs | nmod:poss |
| 16 | back | back | NOUN | Number=Sing | 17 legs | compound |
| 17 | legs | leg | NOUN | Number=Plur | 18 shrank | nsubj |
| 18 | shrank | shrink | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 6 walked | conj |
| 19 | to | to | ADP | _ | 22 bones | case |
| 20 | small | small | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 22 bones | amod |
| 21 | hidden | hidden | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 22 bones | amod |
| 22 | bones | bone | NOUN | Number=Plur | 18 shrank | obl |
| 23 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 32 hippopotamus | punct |
| 24 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 32 hippopotamus | cc |
| 25 | their | their | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 29 relative | nmod:poss |
| 26 | closest | close | ADJ | Degree=Sup | 29 relative | amod |
| 27 | living | living | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 29 relative | amod |
| 28 | land | land | NOUN | Number=Sing | 29 relative | compound |
| 29 | relative | relative | NOUN | Number=Sing | 32 hippopotamus | nsubj |
| 30 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 32 hippopotamus | cop |
| 31 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 32 hippopotamus | det |
| 32 | hippopotamus | hippopotamus | NOUN | Number=Sing | 18 shrank | conj |
| 33 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 mammals | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | present | Whales | mammals | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | walk | past | ancestors | land | ago property | vn run-51.3.2-2-1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme on land=Trajectory | |||
| 3 | shrink | past | ancestors's back legs | to small hidden bones result | vn bend-45.2 «NP V NP PP.result»: agent=Agent to bone=Result | ||||
| 4 | is a | present | ancestors's closest living land relative | the hippopotamus | tree rules |
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:073-evolution-simply.lesson:8.
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): R2-punct-next ×1, R5-strong ×3, R6-punct-agree ×1, R7-rel-agree ×3. 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/73-evolution-simply/8/