The four tones: same sound, different meaning, sentence 11

māma mà mǎ ma? means «is Mum scolding the horse?», a famous tone game friends use to test you, for fun and not to mock.

Who acts: māma, Mum, game friends · What happens: mean, scold, use, test, not mock · To what, where: horse, you · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of the lesson «The four tones: same sound, different meaning» of the chinese street 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 (māma, Mum, game friends), 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	māma	māma	X	Foreign=Yes	6 means	nsubj
2	mà	mà	X	_	1 māma	flat:foreign
3	mǎ	mǎ	X	Foreign=Yes	1 māma	flat:foreign
4	ma	ma	X	Foreign=Yes	1 māma	flat:foreign
5	?	?	PUNCT	_	1 māma	punct
6	means	mean	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
7	«	«	PUNCT	_	10 scolding	punct
8	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	10 scolding	aux
9	Mum	Mum	PROPN	Number=Sing	10 scolding	nsubj
10	scolding	scold	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	6 means	ccomp
11	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	12 horse	det
12	horse	horse	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 scolding	obj
13	?	?	PUNCT	_	6 means	punct
14	»	»	PUNCT	_	21 use	punct
15	,	,	PUNCT	_	21 use	punct
16	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	20 friends	det
17	famous	famous	ADJ	Degree=Pos	19 game	amod
18	tone	tone	NOUN	Number=Sing	19 game	compound
19	game	game	NOUN	Number=Sing	20 friends	compound
20	friends	friend	NOUN	Number=Plur	21 use	nsubj
21	use	use	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	6 means	conj
22	to	to	PART	_	23 test	mark
23	test	test	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	21 use	advcl
24	you	you	PRON	Case=Acc Person=2 PronType=Prs	23 test	obj
25	,	,	PUNCT	_	27 fun	punct
26	for	for	ADP	_	27 fun	case
27	fun	fun	NOUN	Number=Sing	23 test	obl
28	and	and	CCONJ	_	31 mock	cc
29	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	31 mock	advmod
30	to	to	PART	_	31 mock	mark
31	mock	mock	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	23 test	conj
32	.	.	PUNCT	_	6 means	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	mean	present	māma			vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
2	scold in a quote	present · progressive	Mum	the horse		vn judgment-33.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent horse=Theme
3	use	present	a game friends			vn eat-39.1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
4	test	to-infinitive	a game friends not said here	you	for fun	vn assessment-34.1 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Agent you=Theme for fun=Attribute
5	not mock	to-infinitive	a game friends not said here			vn judgment-33.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent

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:chinese-street:002-the-four-tones.lesson:11.

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, R8-pos-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/chinese-street/2-the-four-tones/11/