Silent letters and the mystery of -ough, sentence 7

In Old English, knee was cnēow and was said with a k; people stopped saying the k at the start of words around the 1600s; German Knie still has a spoken k.

Who acts: knee, people, German Knie · What happens: be, say, stop, have, speak, start · To what, where: Old English, k, start, spoken k., words · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of the lesson «Silent letters and the mystery of -ough» of the language 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 (knee, people, German Knie), 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	In	in	ADP	_	3 English	case
2	Old	old	ADJ	Degree=Pos	3 English	amod
3	English	English	PROPN	Number=Sing	7 cnēow	obl
4	,	,	PUNCT	_	3 English	punct
5	knee	knee	NOUN	Number=Sing	7 cnēow	nsubj
6	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	7 cnēow	cop
7	cnēow	cnēow	ADJ	Degree=Pos	root	root
8	and	and	CCONJ	_	10 said	cc
9	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	10 said	aux:pass
10	said	say	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	7 cnēow	conj
11	with	with	ADP	_	13 k	case
12	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	13 k	det
13	k	k	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 said	obl
14	;	;	PUNCT	_	16 stopped	punct
15	people	people	NOUN	Number=Plur	16 stopped	nsubj
16	stopped	stop	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	7 cnēow	parataxis
17	saying	say	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	16 stopped	xcomp
18	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	19 k	det
19	k	k	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 saying	obj
20	at	at	ADP	_	22 start	case
21	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	22 start	det
22	start	start	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 saying	obl
23	of	of	ADP	_	24 words	case
24	words	word	NOUN	Number=Plur	22 start	nmod
25	around	around	ADP	_	27 1600s	case
26	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	27 1600s	det
27	1600s	1600	NOUN	Number=Ptan NumForm=Combi NumType=Card	24 words	nmod
28	;	;	PUNCT	_	32 has	punct
29	German	German	ADJ	Degree=Pos	30 Knie	amod
30	Knie	Knie	PROPN	Number=Sing	32 has	nsubj
31	still	still	ADV	_	32 has	advmod
32	has	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	7 cnēow	parataxis
33	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	35 k.	det
34	spoken	speak	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	35 k.	amod
35	k.	k	NOUN	Number=Sing	32 has	obj

Pragmatics

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

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	is	past	knee		Old English		cnēow property	tree rules
2	say speech: assert	past · passive	knee not said here				with a k	vn pronounce-29.3.1 «NP V NP PP.manner»: with k=Manner
3	stop	past	people					vn stop-55.4-1-1 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Affector clause=Eventuality
4	say speech: assert	gerund	people not said here	the k	the start of words around the 1600s			vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent k=Topic
5	have	present	German Knie	a spoken k.		still		vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent k=Patient
6	speak speech: other	participle						vn talk-37.5 «NP V»: agent=Agent
7	start			words around the 1600s				nom start «event transitive»: of=patient

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:language:013-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough.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): R1-cc-next ×1, R5-strong ×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/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/7/