Silent letters: why French doesn't say everything it writes, sentence 16
After ils or elles (they), the verb ending -ent is silent: ils parlent (they speak) sounds like "eel PARL".
Who acts: ent, s · What happens: be, speak, sound · To what, where: eel PARL · 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 (ent, s), 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 | After | after | ADP | _ | 2 ils | case |
| 2 | ils | il | NOUN | Number=Plur | 15 silent | obl |
| 3 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 4 elles | cc |
| 4 | elles | elle | NOUN | Number=Plur | 2 ils | conj |
| 5 | ( | ( | PUNCT | _ | 6 they | punct |
| 6 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 2 ils | conj |
| 7 | ) | ) | PUNCT | _ | 6 they | punct |
| 8 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 11 ending | punct |
| 9 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 11 ending | det |
| 10 | verb | verb | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 ending | compound |
| 11 | ending | ending | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 ils | conj |
| 12 | - | - | PUNCT | _ | 2 ils | punct |
| 13 | ent | ent | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 silent | nsubj |
| 14 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 15 silent | cop |
| 15 | silent | silent | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 23 sounds | parataxis |
| 16 | : | : | PUNCT | _ | 18 parlent | punct |
| 17 | ils | il | NOUN | Number=Plur | 18 parlent | compound |
| 18 | parlent | parlent | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 silent | obl |
| 19 | ( | ( | PUNCT | _ | 21 speak | punct |
| 20 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 21 speak | nsubj |
| 21 | speak | speak | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 18 parlent | parataxis |
| 22 | ) | ) | PUNCT | _ | 21 speak | punct |
| 23 | sounds | sound | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 24 | like | like | ADP | _ | 26 eel | case |
| 25 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 26 eel | punct |
| 26 | eel | eel | NOUN | Number=Sing | 27 PARL | compound |
| 27 | PARL | parl | NOUN | Number=Sing | 23 sounds | obl |
| 28 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 27 PARL | punct |
| 29 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 15 silent | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is | present | ent | after ils or elles and the verb ending | ils parlent obl; silent property | tree rules | |||
| 2 | speak speech: other | present | s | vn talk-37.5 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 3 | sound | present | eel PARL | vn stimulus_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus |
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:16.
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 ×3, R6-punct-agree ×2, 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/french/1-silent-letters-why-french-doesnt-say-everything-it-writes/16/