How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet, sentence 7

People painted animals on cave walls more than 40,000 years ago, but pictures alone are not writing, because they do not show the exact words.

Who acts: People, peoples · What happens: paint, not write, not show · To what, where: animals, cave walls, exact words

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, peoples), 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 Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	animals	animal	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 painted	obj
4	on	on	ADP	_	6 walls	case
5	cave	cave	NOUN	Number=Sing	6 walls	compound
6	walls	wall	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 painted	obl
7	more	more	ADJ	Degree=Cmp ExtPos=ADV	9 40,000	advmod
8	than	than	ADP	_	7 more	fixed
9	40,000	40000	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	10 years	nummod
10	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	11 ago	obl:unmarked
11	ago	ago	ADV	_	2 painted	advmod
12	,	,	PUNCT	_	14 pictures	punct
13	but	but	CCONJ	_	14 pictures	cc
14	pictures	picture	NOUN	Number=Plur	3 animals	conj
15	alone	alone	ADV	_	14 pictures	advmod
16	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	18 writing	aux
17	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	18 writing	advmod
18	writing	write	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	2 painted	conj
19	,	,	PUNCT	_	24 show	punct
20	because	because	SCONJ	_	24 show	mark
21	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	24 show	nsubj
22	do	do	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	24 show	aux
23	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	24 show	advmod
24	show	show	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	18 writing	advcl
25	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	27 words	det
26	exact	exact	ADJ	Degree=Pos	27 words	amod
27	words	word	NOUN	Number=Plur	24 show	obj
28	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 painted	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	paint	past	People	animals but pictures	cave walls	ago property	vn image_impression-25.1 «NP V NP.theme PP.destination»: agent=Agent animal=Theme on wall=Destination
2	not write	present · progressive	People not said here				vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	not show	present · do-support	peoples = people	the exact words			vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent word=Recipient

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:7.

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 ×5, R6-punct-agree ×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/7/