How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet, sentence 21

Stone Age people in Britain did not write; writing came to Britain with the Romans about 2,000 years ago, so Taffy and Tegumai in Surrey could not really have done it.

Who acts: Age people, writing, Taffy · What happens: not write, come, not do · To what, where: Britain, writing

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 (Age people, writing, Taffy), 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	Stone	Stone	PROPN	Number=Sing	2 Age	compound
2	Age	age	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 people	compound
3	people	people	NOUN	Number=Plur	8 write	nsubj
4	in	in	ADP	_	5 Britain	case
5	Britain	Britain	PROPN	Number=Sing	3 people	nmod
6	did	do	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	8 write	aux
7	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	8 write	advmod
8	write	write	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
9	;	;	PUNCT	_	11 came	punct
10	writing	write	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 came	nsubj
11	came	come	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	8 write	parataxis
12	to	to	ADP	_	13 Britain	case
13	Britain	Britain	PROPN	Number=Sing	11 came	obl
14	with	with	ADP	_	16 Romans	case
15	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	16 Romans	det
16	Romans	Roman	PROPN	Number=Plur	11 came	obl
17	about	about	ADV	_	18 2,000	advmod
18	2,000	2000	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	19 years	nummod
19	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	20 ago	obl:unmarked
20	ago	ago	ADV	_	11 came	advmod
21	,	,	PUNCT	_	32 done	punct
22	so	so	ADV	_	32 done	advmod
23	Taffy	Taffy	PROPN	Number=Sing	32 done	nsubj
24	and	and	CCONJ	_	25 Tegumai	cc
25	Tegumai	Tegumai	PROPN	Number=Sing	23 Taffy	conj
26	in	in	ADP	_	27 Surrey	case
27	Surrey	Surrey	PROPN	Number=Sing	23 Taffy	nmod
28	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	32 done	aux
29	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	32 done	advmod
30	really	really	ADV	_	32 done	advmod
31	have	have	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	32 done	aux
32	done	do	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	8 write	conj
33	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	32 done	obj
34	.	.	PUNCT	_	8 write	punct

Pragmatics

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

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	not write	past · do-support	Age people in Britain				vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
2	come	past	writing		Britain	with the Romans; ago property	vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V PP.initial_location»: agent=Theme to britain=Initial_Location
3	not do	could · perfect	Taffy in Surrey and Tegumai	writing = write			vn act-114-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Eventuality

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:21.

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): R6-punct-agree ×1, R7-rel-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/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/21/