Just So Stories, How the Alphabet Was Made, part 3: «the Alphabet, all complete», and how letters really began, sentence 22

The Phoenicians, sea-traders of the eastern Mediterranean, spread a 22-letter alphabet about 3,000 years ago; it had no letters for vowel sounds.

Who acts: Phoenicians, Alphabet · What happens: spread, have · To what, where: letter alphabet, letters

This is a sentence of the lesson «Just So Stories, How the Alphabet Was Made, part 3: «the Alphabet, all complete», and how letters really began» 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 (Phoenicians, Alphabet), 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	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	2 Phoenicians	det
2	Phoenicians	Phoenician	PROPN	Number=Plur	12 spread	nsubj
3	,	,	PUNCT	_	6 traders	punct
4	sea	sea	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 traders	compound
5	-	-	PUNCT	_	4 sea	punct
6	traders	trader	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 Phoenicians	appos
7	of	of	ADP	_	10 Mediterranean	case
8	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	10 Mediterranean	det
9	eastern	eastern	ADJ	Degree=Pos	10 Mediterranean	amod
10	Mediterranean	Mediterranean	PROPN	Number=Sing	6 traders	nmod
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	2 Phoenicians	punct
12	spread	spread	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
13	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	17 alphabet	det
14	22	22	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	16 letter	nummod
15	-	-	PUNCT	_	14 22	punct
16	letter	letter	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 alphabet	compound
17	alphabet	alphabet	NOUN	Number=Sing	12 spread	obj
18	about	about	ADV	_	19 3,000	advmod
19	3,000	3000	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	20 years	nummod
20	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	21 ago	obl:unmarked
21	ago	ago	ADV	_	12 spread	advmod
22	;	;	PUNCT	_	24 had	punct
23	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	24 had	nsubj
24	had	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	12 spread	parataxis
25	no	no	DET	PronType=Neg	26 letters	det
26	letters	letter	NOUN	Number=Plur	24 had	obj
27	for	for	ADP	_	29 sounds	case
28	vowel	vowel	NOUN	Number=Sing	29 sounds	compound
29	sounds	sound	NOUN	Number=Plur	26 letters	nmod
30	.	.	PUNCT	_	12 spread	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	spread	past	the Phoenicians	a letter alphabet				ago property	vn appear-48.1.1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location alphabet=Theme
2	have	past	Alphabet	no letters				for vowel sounds	vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent letter=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:089-justso-alphabet-3-the-alphabet-all-complete.lesson:22.

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, 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/books/89-justso-alphabet-3-the-alphabet-all-complete/22/