Words that changed their meaning, sentence 1

Ella opens a very old book and reads that a man was "silly" because he was happy and blessed; back then "silly" meant blessed, then it drifted to innocent, and only later to foolish.

Who acts: Ella, man, book, silly, way · What happens: open, read, be, mean, drift · To what, where: old book, innocent · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of the lesson «Words that changed their meaning» 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 (Ella, man, book, silly), 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	Ella	Ella	PROPN	Number=Sing	2 opens	nsubj
2	opens	open	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	6 book	det
4	very	very	ADV	_	5 old	advmod
5	old	old	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 book	amod
6	book	book	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 opens	obj
7	and	and	CCONJ	_	8 reads	cc
8	reads	read	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	2 opens	conj
9	that	that	SCONJ	_	14 silly	mark
10	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	11 man	det
11	man	man	NOUN	Number=Sing	14 silly	nsubj
12	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	14 silly	cop
13	"	"	PUNCT	_	14 silly	punct
14	silly	silly	ADJ	Degree=Pos	8 reads	ccomp
15	"	"	PUNCT	_	14 silly	punct
16	because	because	SCONJ	_	19 happy	mark
17	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	19 happy	nsubj
18	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	19 happy	cop
19	happy	happy	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 opens	advcl
20	and	and	CCONJ	_	21 blessed	cc
21	blessed	blessed	ADJ	Degree=Pos	19 happy	conj
22	;	;	PUNCT	_	28 meant	punct
23	back	back	ADV	_	24 then	advmod
24	then	then	ADV	PronType=Dem	28 meant	advmod
25	"	"	PUNCT	_	26 silly	punct
26	silly	silly	ADJ	Degree=Pos	28 meant	nsubj
27	"	"	PUNCT	_	26 silly	punct
28	meant	mean	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 opens	parataxis
29	blessed	blessed	ADJ	Degree=Pos	28 meant	xcomp
30	,	,	PUNCT	_	33 drifted	punct
31	then	then	ADV	PronType=Dem	33 drifted	advmod
32	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	33 drifted	nsubj
33	drifted	drift	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 opens	conj
34	to	to	ADP	_	35 innocent	case
35	innocent	innocent	ADJ	Degree=Pos	33 drifted	obl
36	,	,	PUNCT	_	41 foolish	punct
37	and	and	CCONJ	_	41 foolish	cc
38	only	only	ADV	_	39 later	advmod
39	later	late	ADV	Degree=Cmp	41 foolish	advmod
40	to	to	ADP	_	41 foolish	case
41	foolish	foolish	ADJ	Degree=Pos	33 drifted	conj
42	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 opens	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	open	present	Ella	a old book				vn spatial_configuration-47.6-1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location book=Theme
2	read	present	Ella not said here					vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent
3	is in a quote	past	a man				silly property	tree rules
4	is	past	book				happy property	tree rules
5	be		book not said here					tree rules
6	mean	past	silly			then	blessed property	vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent
7	drift	past	way		innocent	then		vn run-51.3.2-2 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme to innocent=Destination

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:038-words-that-changed-their-meaning.lesson:1.

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): R7-rel-agree ×1, 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/38-words-that-changed-their-meaning/1/