Just So Stories, How the Alphabet Was Made, part 2: yo, so, sho, shi, and shu-ya, the sky-water, sentence 29

That is why an alphabet is so powerful: English needs only 26 letters, but Chinese writing uses thousands of characters.

Who acts: alphabet, English, Chinese writing · What happens: be, need, use · To what, where: 26 letters, thousands

This is a sentence of the lesson «Just So Stories, How the Alphabet Was Made, part 2: yo, so, sho, shi, and shu-ya, the sky-water» 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 (alphabet, English, Chinese writing), 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	That	that	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Dem	2 is	nsubj
2	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	why	why	ADV	PronType=Rel	8 powerful	advmod
4	an	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	5 alphabet	det
5	alphabet	alphabet	NOUN	Number=Sing	8 powerful	nsubj
6	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	8 powerful	cop
7	so	so	ADV	_	8 powerful	advmod
8	powerful	powerful	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 is	ccomp
9	:	:	PUNCT	_	11 needs	punct
10	English	English	PROPN	Number=Sing	11 needs	nsubj
11	needs	need	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	8 powerful	parataxis
12	only	only	ADV	_	14 letters	advmod
13	26	26	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	14 letters	nummod
14	letters	letter	NOUN	Number=Plur	11 needs	obj
15	,	,	PUNCT	_	19 uses	punct
16	but	but	CCONJ	_	19 uses	cc
17	Chinese	Chinese	ADJ	Degree=Pos	18 writing	amod
18	writing	writing	NOUN	Number=Sing	19 uses	nsubj
19	uses	use	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	11 needs	conj
20	thousands	thousand	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 uses	obj
21	of	of	ADP	_	22 characters	case
22	characters	character	NOUN	Number=Plur	20 thousands	nmod
23	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 is	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	is	present	a alphabet		powerful property	tree rules
2	need	present	English	26 letters		vn want-32.1-1-1 «NP V NP ADV»: agent=Pivot letter=Theme
3	use	present	Chinese writing	thousands of characters		vn eat-39.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent thousand=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:088-justso-alphabet-2-shu-ya-sky-water.lesson:29.

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. 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/88-justso-alphabet-2-shu-ya-sky-water/29/