Ancient China: dynasties, the First Emperor and the Great Wall, sentence 10

Shang kings, over 3,000 years ago, asked their ancestors questions by heating bones and shells until they cracked, then wrote on them; these oracle bones hold the oldest Chinese writing known.

Who acts: Shang kings, families, oracle bones · What happens: ask, heating, crack, write, hold, know · To what, where: ancestors questions, bones, oldest Chinese writing

This is a sentence of the lesson «Ancient China: dynasties, the First Emperor and the Great Wall» 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 (Shang kings, families, oracle bones), 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	Shang	Shang	PROPN	Number=Sing	2 kings	compound
2	kings	king	NOUN	Number=Plur	9 asked	nsubj
3	,	,	PUNCT	_	7 ago	punct
4	over	over	ADV	_	5 3,000	advmod
5	3,000	3000	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	6 years	nummod
6	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	7 ago	obl:unmarked
7	ago	ago	ADV	_	9 asked	advmod
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	2 kings	punct
9	asked	ask	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
10	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	11 ancestors	nmod:poss
11	ancestors	ancestor	NOUN	Number=Plur	12 questions	compound
12	questions	question	NOUN	Number=Plur	9 asked	obj
13	by	by	SCONJ	_	14 heating	mark
14	heating	heating	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	9 asked	advcl
15	bones	bone	NOUN	Number=Plur	14 heating	obj
16	and	and	CCONJ	_	17 shells	cc
17	shells	shell	NOUN	Number=Plur	15 bones	conj
18	until	until	SCONJ	_	20 cracked	mark
19	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	20 cracked	nsubj
20	cracked	crack	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	14 heating	advcl
21	,	,	PUNCT	_	23 wrote	punct
22	then	then	ADV	PronType=Dem	23 wrote	advmod
23	wrote	write	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	9 asked	parataxis
24	on	on	ADP	_	25 them	case
25	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	23 wrote	obl
26	;	;	PUNCT	_	30 hold	punct
27	these	this	DET	Number=Plur PronType=Dem	29 bones	det
28	oracle	oracle	NOUN	Number=Sing	29 bones	compound
29	bones	bone	NOUN	Number=Plur	30 hold	nsubj
30	hold	hold	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	23 wrote	conj
31	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	34 writing	det
32	oldest	old	ADJ	Degree=Sup	34 writing	amod
33	Chinese	Chinese	ADJ	Degree=Pos	34 writing	amod
34	writing	writing	NOUN	Number=Sing	30 hold	obj
35	known	know	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	34 writing	acl
36	.	.	PUNCT	_	9 asked	punct

Pragmatics

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

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	when	other	roles by
1	ask speech: ask	past	Shang kings	ancestors questions		ago property	vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent question=Recipient
2	heating	gerund	Shang kings not said here	bones and shells			tree rules
3	crack	past	families = family				vn sound_emission-43.2 «NP V»: agent=Theme
4	write	past			then	on families = family	vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent on they=Destination
5	hold	present	this oracle bones	the oldest Chinese writing			vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent writing=Theme
6	know	participle		the oldest Chinese writing not said here			vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer

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:009-ancient-china-dynasties-the-first-emperor-and-the-great-wall.lesson:10.

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 ×3, R7-rel-agree ×2. 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/9-ancient-china-dynasties-the-first-emperor-and-the-great-wall/10/