How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet, sentence 12
The first writers in Egypt and Mesopotamia used it to write names and words that cannot be drawn.
Who acts: first writers · What happens: use, write, not draw · To what, where: belief, names
This is a sentence of the lesson «How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet» 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 (first writers), 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 | 3 writers | det |
| 2 | first | first | ADJ | Degree=Pos NumForm=Word NumType=Ord | 3 writers | amod |
| 3 | writers | writer | NOUN | Number=Plur | 8 used | nsubj |
| 4 | in | in | ADP | _ | 5 Egypt | case |
| 5 | Egypt | Egypt | PROPN | Number=Sing | 3 writers | nmod |
| 6 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 7 Mesopotamia | cc |
| 7 | Mesopotamia | Mesopotamia | PROPN | Number=Sing | 5 Egypt | conj |
| 8 | used | use | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 9 | it | it | PRON | Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 8 used | obj |
| 10 | to | to | PART | _ | 11 write | mark |
| 11 | write | write | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 8 used | advcl |
| 12 | names | name | NOUN | Number=Plur | 11 write | obj |
| 13 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 14 words | cc |
| 14 | words | word | NOUN | Number=Plur | 12 names | conj |
| 15 | that | that | PRON | PronType=Rel | 19 drawn | nsubj:pass |
| 16 | can | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 19 drawn | aux |
| 17 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 19 drawn | advmod |
| 18 | be | be | AUX | VerbForm=Inf | 19 drawn | aux:pass |
| 19 | drawn | draw | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 12 names | acl:relcl |
| 20 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 8 used | punct |
Pragmatics
- form
- statement
- act
- assert
- voice
- narrator
- polarity
- none
- teacher
- kept the draft
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | use | past | the first writers in Egypt and Mesopotamia | belief | vn eat-39.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Patient | ||||
| 2 | write | to-infinitive | the first writers in Egypt and Mesopotamia not said here | names and words | vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent name=Theme | ||||
| 3 | not draw | can · passive | names and words | vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V NP»: subject=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:082-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet.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): R1-cc-next ×2, R5-strong ×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/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/12/