How babies learn to talk, sentence 0
Babies start learning language before they can say a single word: newborns already prefer their mother's voice and the sounds of the language they heard before they were born.
Who acts: Babies, newborns · What happens: start, learn, say, prefer, hear, bear · To what, where: language, single word, voice, Babies · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of the lesson «How babies learn to talk» 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 (Babies, newborns), 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 | Babies | baby | NOUN | Number=Plur | 2 start | nsubj |
| 2 | start | start | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 3 | learning | learn | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 2 start | xcomp |
| 4 | language | language | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 learning | obj |
| 5 | before | before | SCONJ | _ | 8 say | mark |
| 6 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 8 say | nsubj |
| 7 | can | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 8 say | aux |
| 8 | say | say | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 2 start | advcl |
| 9 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 11 word | det |
| 10 | single | single | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 11 word | amod |
| 11 | word | word | NOUN | Number=Sing | 8 say | obj |
| 12 | : | : | PUNCT | _ | 15 prefer | punct |
| 13 | newborns | newborn | NOUN | Number=Plur | 15 prefer | nsubj |
| 14 | already | already | ADV | _ | 15 prefer | advmod |
| 15 | prefer | prefer | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 2 start | parataxis |
| 16 | their | their | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 17 mother | nmod:poss |
| 17 | mother | mother | NOUN | Number=Sing | 19 voice | nmod:poss |
| 18 | 's | 's | PART | _ | 17 mother | case |
| 19 | voice | voice | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 prefer | obj |
| 20 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 22 sounds | cc |
| 21 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 22 sounds | det |
| 22 | sounds | sound | NOUN | Number=Plur | 19 voice | conj |
| 23 | of | of | ADP | _ | 25 language | case |
| 24 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 25 language | det |
| 25 | language | language | NOUN | Number=Sing | 22 sounds | nmod |
| 26 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 27 heard | nsubj |
| 27 | heard | hear | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 25 language | acl:relcl |
| 28 | before | before | SCONJ | _ | 31 born | mark |
| 29 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 31 born | nsubj:pass |
| 30 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 31 born | aux:pass |
| 31 | born | bear | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 27 heard | advcl |
| 32 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 2 start | punct |
Pragmatics
- form
- statement
- act
- assert
- voice
- narrator
- polarity
- none
- teacher
- kept the draft
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | start | present | Babies | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality | |||||
| 2 | learn | gerund | Babies not said here | language | vn learn-14-2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent language=Topic | ||||
| 3 | say speech: assert | can | Babies = baby | a single word | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent word=Topic | ||||
| 4 | prefer | present | newborns | newborns's mother's voice and the sounds of the language | vn admire-31.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Experiencer voice=Stimulus | ||||
| 5 | hear | past | Babies = baby | the language not said here | vn see-30.1-1-1 «NP V S»: agent=Experiencer language=Stimulus | ||||
| 6 | bear | past · passive | Babies = baby | vn birth-28.2-1-1 «NP V NP»: subject=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:031-how-babies-learn-to-talk.lesson:0.
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): no change. 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/31-how-babies-learn-to-talk/0/