Standard English and dialect: "we was" in talk, "we were" in writing, sentence 10

Dialects follow rules: speakers of "we was" use "was" with every person, which is a regular pattern, not a random mistake.

Who acts: Dialects, we, use · What happens: follow, be · To what, where: rules, regular pattern

This is a sentence of the lesson «Standard English and dialect: "we was" in talk, "we were" in writing» of the english 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 (Dialects, we, use), 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	Dialects	dialect	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 follow	nsubj
2	follow	follow	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	rules	rule	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 follow	obj
4	:	:	PUNCT	_	5 speakers	punct
5	speakers	speaker	NOUN	Number=Plur	3 rules	appos
6	of	of	ADP	_	11 use	case
7	"	"	PUNCT	_	11 use	punct
8	we	we	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=1 PronType=Prs	11 use	nsubj
9	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	11 use	cop
10	"	"	PUNCT	_	11 use	punct
11	use	use	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 speakers	nmod
12	"	"	PUNCT	_	11 use	punct
13	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	14 "	cop
14	"	"	PUNCT	_	11 use	punct
15	with	with	ADP	_	17 person	case
16	every	every	DET	PronType=Tot	17 person	det
17	person	person	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 use	nmod
18	,	,	PUNCT	_	23 pattern	punct
19	which	which	PRON	PronType=Rel	23 pattern	nsubj
20	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	23 pattern	cop
21	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	23 pattern	det
22	regular	regular	ADJ	Degree=Pos	23 pattern	amod
23	pattern	pattern	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 use	nmod
24	,	,	PUNCT	_	28 mistake	punct
25	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	28 mistake	advmod
26	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	28 mistake	det
27	random	random	ADJ	Degree=Pos	28 mistake	amod
28	mistake	mistake	NOUN	Number=Sing	23 pattern	parataxis
29	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 follow	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	follow	present	Dialects	rules		vn chase-51.6 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent rule=Theme
2	is	past	we		of use; with every person	tree rules
3	is a	present	use	a regular pattern		tree rules

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:english:038-standard-english-and-dialect-we-was-and-we-were.lesson:10.

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): 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/english/38-standard-english-and-dialect-we-was-and-we-were/10/