Silent letters: why French doesn't say everything it writes, sentence 0

French writes lots of letters that nobody says out loud, a bit like the silent k in English "knee" and the silent b in "lamb".

Who acts: French, nobody · What happens: write, say · To what, where: lots, letters · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of the lesson «Silent letters: why French doesn't say everything it writes» of the french 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 (French, nobody), 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	French	French	PROPN	Number=Sing	2 writes	nsubj
2	writes	write	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	lots	lot	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 writes	obj
4	of	of	ADP	_	5 letters	case
5	letters	letter	NOUN	Number=Plur	3 lots	nmod
6	that	that	PRON	PronType=Rel	8 says	obj
7	nobody	nobody	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Neg	8 says	nsubj
8	says	say	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	5 letters	acl:relcl
9	out	out	ADV	_	10 loud	advmod
10	loud	loud	ADV	_	8 says	advmod
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	13 bit	punct
12	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	13 bit	det
13	bit	bit	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 writes	appos
14	like	like	ADP	_	17 k	case
15	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	17 k	det
16	silent	silent	ADJ	Degree=Pos	17 k	amod
17	k	k	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 bit	nmod
18	in	in	ADP	_	19 English	case
19	English	English	PROPN	Number=Sing	17 k	nmod
20	"	"	PUNCT	_	21 knee	punct
21	knee	knee	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 k	nmod
22	"	"	PUNCT	_	21 knee	punct
23	and	and	CCONJ	_	26 b	cc
24	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	26 b	det
25	silent	silent	ADJ	Degree=Pos	26 b	amod
26	b	B	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 k	conj
27	in	in	ADP	_	29 lamb	case
28	"	"	PUNCT	_	29 lamb	punct
29	lamb	lamb	NOUN	Number=Sing	26 b	nmod
30	"	"	PUNCT	_	29 lamb	punct
31	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 writes	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	write	present	French	lots of letters					vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent lot=Theme
2	say speech: assert	present	nobody	letters				loud property	vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent that=Topic

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:french:001-silent-letters-why-french-doesnt-say-everything-it-writes.lesson:0.

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 ×2, R6-punct-agree ×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/french/1-silent-letters-why-french-doesnt-say-everything-it-writes/0/