How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet, sentence 2

People painted animals in caves tens of thousands of years ago, but a picture is not yet writing: it does not tell you the exact words, so two people can read it two different ways, just as Taffy's mother did.

Who acts: People, picture, two people · What happens: paint, not write, not tell, read · To what, where: animals, caves, exact words, you, picture · Speech: someone speaks here

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 (People, picture, two 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	People	people	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 painted	nsubj
2	painted	paint	VERB	Mood=Ind Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	animals	animal	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 painted	obj
4	in	in	ADP	_	5 caves	case
5	caves	cave	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 painted	obl
6	tens	ten	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 painted	obl:unmarked
7	of	of	ADP	_	8 thousands	case
8	thousands	thousand	NOUN	Number=Plur	6 tens	nmod
9	of	of	ADP	_	10 years	case
10	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	8 thousands	nmod
11	ago	ago	ADV	_	2 painted	advmod
12	,	,	PUNCT	_	19 writing	punct
13	but	but	CCONJ	_	19 writing	cc
14	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	15 picture	det
15	picture	picture	NOUN	Number=Sing	19 writing	nsubj
16	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	19 writing	aux
17	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	19 writing	advmod
18	yet	yet	ADV	_	19 writing	advmod
19	writing	write	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	2 painted	conj
20	:	:	PUNCT	_	24 tell	punct
21	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	24 tell	nsubj
22	does	do	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	24 tell	aux
23	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	24 tell	advmod
24	tell	tell	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	19 writing	conj
25	you	you	PRON	Case=Acc Person=2 PronType=Prs	24 tell	iobj
26	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	28 words	det
27	exact	exact	ADJ	Degree=Pos	28 words	amod
28	words	word	NOUN	Number=Plur	24 tell	obj
29	,	,	PUNCT	_	34 read	punct
30	so	so	ADV	_	34 read	advmod
31	two	two	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	32 people	nummod
32	people	people	NOUN	Number=Plur	34 read	nsubj
33	can	can	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	34 read	aux
34	read	read	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	24 tell	ccomp
35	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	34 read	obj
36	two	two	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	38 ways	nummod
37	different	different	ADJ	Degree=Pos	38 ways	amod
38	ways	way	NOUN	Number=Plur	34 read	obl
39	,	,	PUNCT	_	45 did	punct
40	just	just	ADV	_	45 did	advmod
41	as	as	SCONJ	_	45 did	mark
42	Taffy	Taffy	PROPN	Number=Sing	44 mother	nmod:poss
43	's	's	PART	_	42 Taffy	case
44	mother	mother	NOUN	Number=Sing	45 did	nsubj
45	did	do	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	34 read	advcl
46	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 painted	punct

Pragmatics

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

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	paint	past	People	animals		caves		tens of thousands of years obl:unmarked; ago property	vn image_impression-25.1 «NP V NP.theme PP.destination»: agent=Agent animal=Theme in cave=Destination
2	not write	present · progressive	a picture				yet		vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	not tell speech: assert	present · do-support	picture	the exact words	you				tree rules
4	read	can	two people	picture				two different ways obl	vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=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:history:082-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet.lesson:2.

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 ×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/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/2/