Formal and informal: a mate versus the head teacher, sentence 12

A good complaint letter states the problem, gives the facts and asks politely; people are more likely to help when you are polite.

Who acts: good complaint letter, people, you · What happens: state, give, ask, be, help · To what, where: problem, facts

This is a sentence of the lesson «Formal and informal: a mate versus the head teacher» 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 (good complaint letter, people, you), 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	A	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	4 letter	det
2	good	good	ADJ	Degree=Pos	4 letter	amod
3	complaint	complaint	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 letter	compound
4	letter	letter	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 states	nsubj
5	states	state	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
6	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	7 problem	det
7	problem	problem	NOUN	Number=Sing	5 states	obj
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	9 gives	punct
9	gives	give	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	5 states	conj
10	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	11 facts	det
11	facts	fact	NOUN	Number=Plur	9 gives	obj
12	and	and	CCONJ	_	13 asks	cc
13	asks	ask	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	5 states	conj
14	politely	politely	ADV	_	13 asks	advmod
15	;	;	PUNCT	_	19 likely	punct
16	people	people	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 likely	nsubj
17	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	19 likely	cop
18	more	more	ADV	Degree=Cmp	19 likely	advmod
19	likely	likely	ADJ	Degree=Pos	5 states	conj
20	to	to	PART	_	21 help	mark
21	help	help	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	19 likely	xcomp
22	when	when	SCONJ	_	25 polite	mark
23	you	you	PRON	Case=Nom Person=2 PronType=Prs	25 polite	nsubj
24	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=2 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	25 polite	cop
25	polite	polite	ADJ	Degree=Pos	21 help	advcl
26	.	.	PUNCT	_	5 states	punct

Pragmatics

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

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	state speech: other	present	a good complaint letter	the problem		vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent problem=Topic
2	give	present	a good complaint letter not said here	the facts		vn give-13.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent fact=Theme
3	ask speech: ask	present	a good complaint letter not said here		politely property	vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent
4	is	present	people		likely property	tree rules
5	help	to-infinitive	people not said here			vn help-72.1-1-1 «NP V PP.theme»: agent=Agent
6	is	present	you		polite property	tree rules

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:016-formal-and-informal-a-mate-versus-the-head-teacher.lesson:12.

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): R3-conj-first ×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/language/16-formal-and-informal-a-mate-versus-the-head-teacher/12/