The four tones: same sound, different meaning, sentence 8

mǎ («mah» dipping low, then a little up) is the third tone, and mǎ means horse; in fast talk it often just goes low and stays there.

Who acts: up, mǎ, horse · What happens: dip, be, means, go, stay · To what, where: third tone, horse, fast talk

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 (up, mǎ, horse), 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	mǎ	mǎ	PROPN	Number=Sing	17 tone	nsubj
2	(	(	PUNCT	_	4 mah	punct
3	«	«	PUNCT	_	4 mah	punct
4	mah	mah	INTJ	_	12 up	discourse
5	»	»	PUNCT	_	4 mah	punct
6	dipping	dip	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	12 up	acl
7	low	low	ADV	Degree=Pos	6 dipping	advmod
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	12 up	punct
9	then	then	ADV	_	12 up	advmod
10	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	11 little	det
11	little	little	ADJ	Degree=Pos	12 up	obl
12	up	up	NOUN	Number=Sing	1 mǎ	appos
13	)	)	PUNCT	_	12 up	punct
14	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	17 tone	cop
15	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	17 tone	det
16	third	third	ADJ	Degree=Pos NumForm=Word NumType=Ord	17 tone	amod
17	tone	tone	NOUN	Number=Sing	root	root
18	,	,	PUNCT	_	21 means	punct
19	and	and	CCONJ	_	21 means	cc
20	mǎ	mǎ	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	21 means	nsubj
21	means	means	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	17 tone	conj
22	horse	horse	NOUN	Number=Sing	21 means	obj
23	;	;	PUNCT	_	26 talk	punct
24	in	in	ADP	_	26 talk	case
25	fast	fast	ADJ	Degree=Pos	26 talk	amod
26	talk	talk	NOUN	Number=Sing	30 goes	obl
27	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	30 goes	nsubj
28	often	often	ADV	_	30 goes	advmod
29	just	just	ADV	_	30 goes	advmod
30	goes	go	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	17 tone	parataxis
31	low	low	ADJ	Degree=Pos	30 goes	xcomp
32	and	and	CCONJ	_	33 stays	cc
33	stays	stay	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	30 goes	conj
34	there	there	ADV	PronType=Dem	33 stays	advmod
35	.	.	PUNCT	_	17 tone	punct

Pragmatics

form: statement
act: assert
voice: narrator
polarity: none
teacher: kept the draft

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	dip	gerund	up not said here			low property	vn meander-47.7-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
2	is a	present	mǎ	the third tone			tree rules
3	means	present	mǎ	horse			tree rules
4	go	present	horse		fast talk	low, often property	vn occur-48.3-2 «NP V PP»: agent=Theme in talk=Location
5	stay	present	horse not said here		there		vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme

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: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): R5-strong ×1, R6-punct-agree ×2, 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/8/