Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing, sentence 12

The Sumerians invented one of the first writing systems about 5,200 years ago; it began as little pictures used to count grain and sheep.

Who acts: Sumerians, water · What happens: invent, begin, use, count · To what, where: one, little pictures, grain

This is a sentence of the lesson «Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing» of the history 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 (Sumerians, water), 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	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	2 Sumerians	det
2	Sumerians	Sumerian	PROPN	Number=Plur	3 invented	nsubj
3	invented	invent	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	one	one	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	3 invented	obj
5	of	of	ADP	_	9 systems	case
6	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	9 systems	det
7	first	first	ADJ	Degree=Pos NumForm=Word NumType=Ord	9 systems	amod
8	writing	writing	NOUN	Number=Sing	9 systems	compound
9	systems	system	NOUN	Number=Plur	4 one	nmod
10	about	about	ADP	_	12 years	case
11	5,200	5,200	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	12 years	nummod
12	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	13 ago	obl:unmarked
13	ago	ago	ADV	_	3 invented	advmod
14	;	;	PUNCT	_	16 began	punct
15	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	16 began	nsubj
16	began	begin	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	3 invented	parataxis
17	as	as	ADP	_	19 pictures	case
18	little	little	ADJ	Degree=Pos	19 pictures	amod
19	pictures	picture	NOUN	Number=Plur	16 began	obl
20	used	use	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	19 pictures	acl
21	to	to	PART	_	22 count	mark
22	count	count	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	20 used	advcl
23	grain	grain	NOUN	Number=Sing	22 count	obj
24	and	and	CCONJ	_	25 sheep	cc
25	sheep	sheep	NOUN	Number=Plur	23 grain	conj
26	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 invented	punct

Pragmatics

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

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	invent	past	the Sumerians	one of the first writing systems	ago property	vn create-26.4-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent one=Result
2	begin	past	water		as little pictures	vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality
3	use	participle		little pictures not said here		vn eat-39.1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
4	count	to-infinitive		grain and sheep		vn multiply-108 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent grain=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:history:003-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing.lesson:12.

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, 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/history/3-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing/12/