Writing, laws and money: how strangers learned to trust each other, sentence 17

Cowrie shells were used as money for hundreds of years in parts of Africa, India and China; in early Mesopotamia people paid in grain or silver weighed on scales.

Who acts: people · What happens: use, pay, weigh · To what, where: Cowrie shells, parts, early Mesopotamia, silver, scales

This is a sentence of the lesson «Writing, laws and money: how strangers learned to trust each other» 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 (people), 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	Cowrie	cowrie	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 shells	compound
2	shells	shell	NOUN	Number=Plur	4 used	nsubj:pass
3	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 used	aux:pass
4	used	use	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	root	root
5	as	as	ADP	_	6 money	case
6	money	money	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 used	obl
7	for	for	ADP	_	8 hundreds	case
8	hundreds	hundred	NOUN	Number=Plur	4 used	obl
9	of	of	ADP	_	10 years	case
10	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	8 hundreds	nmod
11	in	in	ADP	_	12 parts	case
12	parts	part	NOUN	Number=Plur	4 used	obl
13	of	of	ADP	_	14 Africa	case
14	Africa	Africa	PROPN	Number=Sing	12 parts	nmod
15	,	,	PUNCT	_	16 India	punct
16	India	India	PROPN	Number=Sing	14 Africa	conj
17	and	and	CCONJ	_	18 China	cc
18	China	China	PROPN	Number=Sing	14 Africa	conj
19	;	;	PUNCT	_	24 paid	punct
20	in	in	ADP	_	22 Mesopotamia	case
21	early	early	ADJ	Degree=Pos	22 Mesopotamia	amod
22	Mesopotamia	Mesopotamia	PROPN	Number=Sing	24 paid	obl
23	people	people	NOUN	Number=Plur	24 paid	nsubj
24	paid	pay	VERB	Mood=Ind Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 used	parataxis
25	in	in	ADP	_	26 grain	case
26	grain	grain	NOUN	Number=Sing	24 paid	obl
27	or	or	CCONJ	_	28 silver	cc
28	silver	silver	NOUN	Number=Sing	26 grain	conj
29	weighed	weigh	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	28 silver	acl
30	on	on	ADP	_	31 scales	case
31	scales	scale	NOUN	Number=Plur	29 weighed	obl
32	.	.	PUNCT	_	4 used	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	use	past · passive		Cowrie shells	parts of Africa and India and China	as money; for hundreds of years	vn spend_time-104 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: subject=Duration as money=Attribute
2	pay	past	people		early Mesopotamia	in grain or silver	vn pay-68-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent
3	weigh	participle		silver not said here	scales		vn register-54.1-2-1 «NP V NP.value»: 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:history:063-writing-laws-and-money-how-strangers-learned-to-trust-each-other.lesson:17.

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): 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/63-writing-laws-and-money-how-strangers-learned-to-trust-each-other/17/