Just So Stories, How the First Letter Was Written, part 3: «a great invention» and the road on Merrow Down, sentence 25
Real life: the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet are true, but they came thousands of years after the Stone Age; the Head Chief could not really have known about them.
Who acts: Real life, letters, Head Chief · What happens: be, come, not know, letter · To what, where: thousands, English alphabet
This is a sentence of the lesson «Just So Stories, How the First Letter Was Written, part 3: «a great invention» and the road on Merrow Down» of the books 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 (Real life, letters, Head Chief), 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 | Real | real | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 2 life | amod |
| 2 | life | life | NOUN | Number=Sing | 14 true | nsubj |
| 3 | : | : | PUNCT | _ | 8 letters | punct |
| 4 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 8 letters | det |
| 5 | twenty | twenty | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 7 six | compound |
| 6 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 5 twenty | punct |
| 7 | six | six | NUM | NumForm=Word NumType=Card | 8 letters | nummod |
| 8 | letters | letter | NOUN | Number=Plur | 14 true | nsubj |
| 9 | of | of | ADP | _ | 12 alphabet | case |
| 10 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 12 alphabet | det |
| 11 | English | English | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 12 alphabet | amod |
| 12 | alphabet | alphabet | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 letters | nmod |
| 13 | are | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 14 true | cop |
| 14 | true | true | ADJ | Degree=Pos | root | root |
| 15 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 18 came | punct |
| 16 | but | but | CCONJ | _ | 18 came | cc |
| 17 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 18 came | nsubj |
| 18 | came | come | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 14 true | conj |
| 19 | thousands | thousand | NOUN | Number=Plur | 18 came | obj |
| 20 | of | of | ADP | _ | 21 years | case |
| 21 | years | year | NOUN | Number=Plur | 19 thousands | nmod |
| 22 | after | after | ADP | _ | 25 Age | case |
| 23 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 25 Age | det |
| 24 | Stone | Stone | PROPN | Number=Sing | 25 Age | compound |
| 25 | Age | age | PROPN | Number=Sing | 18 came | obl |
| 26 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 34 known | punct |
| 27 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 29 Chief | det |
| 28 | Head | Head | PROPN | Number=Sing | 29 Chief | compound |
| 29 | Chief | Chief | PROPN | Number=Sing | 34 known | nsubj |
| 30 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 34 known | aux |
| 31 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 34 known | advmod |
| 32 | really | really | ADV | _ | 34 known | advmod |
| 33 | have | have | AUX | VerbForm=Inf | 34 known | aux |
| 34 | known | know | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 14 true | conj |
| 35 | about | about | ADP | _ | 36 them | case |
| 36 | them | they | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 34 known | obl |
| 37 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 life | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | present | Real life | true property | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | come | past | letters = letter | thousands of years | after the Stone Age | vn appear-48.1.1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location thousand=Theme | |||
| 3 | not know | could · perfect | the Head Chief | about letters = letter | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V PP.stimulus»: agent=Experiencer about they=Stimulus | ||||
| 4 | letter | the English alphabet | nom letter «communication 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:books:086-justso-first-letter-3-a-great-invention.lesson:25.
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, R6-punct-agree ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1, R8-pos-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/books/86-justso-first-letter-3-a-great-invention/25/