Words that changed their meaning, sentence 7

In Middle English "girl" meant any young child, boy or girl; later it narrowed to mean only a female child; narrowing is when a word comes to mean something more specific.

Who acts: English girl, child, word · What happens: mean, narrow, be, come · To what, where: young child, female child, something

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 (English girl, child, word), 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	_	5 girl	case
2	Middle	Middle	PROPN	_	3 English	compound
3	English	English	PROPN	Number=Sing	5 girl	compound
4	"	"	PUNCT	_	5 girl	punct
5	girl	girl	NOUN	Number=Sing	7 meant	nsubj
6	"	"	PUNCT	_	5 girl	punct
7	meant	mean	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
8	any	any	DET	PronType=Ind	10 child	det
9	young	young	ADJ	Degree=Pos	10 child	amod
10	child	child	NOUN	Number=Sing	7 meant	obj
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	12 boy	punct
12	boy	boy	NOUN	Number=Sing	10 child	appos
13	or	or	CCONJ	_	14 girl	cc
14	girl	girl	NOUN	Number=Sing	12 boy	conj
15	;	;	PUNCT	_	18 narrowed	punct
16	later	late	ADV	Degree=Cmp	18 narrowed	advmod
17	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	18 narrowed	nsubj
18	narrowed	narrow	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	7 meant	parataxis
19	to	to	PART	_	20 mean	mark
20	mean	mean	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	18 narrowed	xcomp
21	only	only	ADV	_	24 child	advmod
22	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	24 child	det
23	female	female	ADJ	Degree=Pos	24 child	amod
24	child	child	NOUN	Number=Sing	20 mean	obj
25	;	;	PUNCT	_	26 narrowing	punct
26	narrowing	narrow	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	7 meant	parataxis
27	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	26 narrowing	cop
28	when	when	ADV	PronType=Int	31 comes	advmod
29	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	30 word	det
30	word	word	NOUN	Number=Sing	31 comes	nsubj
31	comes	come	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	26 narrowing	advcl
32	to	to	PART	_	33 mean	mark
33	mean	mean	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	31 comes	xcomp
34	something	something	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Ind	33 mean	obj
35	more	more	ADV	Degree=Cmp	36 specific	advmod
36	specific	specific	ADJ	Degree=Pos	34 something	amod
37	.	.	PUNCT	_	7 meant	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	mean	past	English girl	any young child		vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent child=Topic
2	narrow	past	child		late property	tree rules
3	mean	to-infinitive	child not said here	a female child		vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent child=Topic
4	is	present			narrow property	tree rules
5	come	present	a word			tree rules
6	mean	to-infinitive	a word not said here	something		vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent something=Topic

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: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, 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/language/38-words-that-changed-their-meaning/7/