---
title: Plastic lasts hundreds of years and slowly breaks into tiny pieces c… — Plastics: useful and stubborn · tree and pragmatics
description: Plastic lasts hundreds of years and slowly breaks into tiny pieces called microplastics, because few microbes can eat it. Who acts: Plastic, tiny pieces, few microbes. A sentence of the lesson «Plastics: useful and stubborn» of the chemistry course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree a
---

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# Plastics: useful and stubborn, sentence 10

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Plastic lasts hundreds of years and slowly breaks into tiny pieces called microplastics, because few microbes can eat it.

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**Who acts:** Plastic, tiny pieces, few microbes · **What happens:** last, break, call, eat · **To what, where:** hundreds, tiny pieces, microplastics, kind · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Plastics: useful and stubborn» of the chemistry 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 (Plastic, tiny pieces, few microbes), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:chemistry:029-plastics-useful-stubborn.lesson:10
# text = Plastic lasts hundreds of years and slowly breaks into tiny pieces called microplastics, because few microbes can eat it.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = chemistry
# lesson = 029-plastics-useful-stubborn.lesson
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R5-strong ×1
1	Plastic	plastic	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	lasts	last	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	hundreds	hundred	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obj	_	_
4	of	of	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
5	years	year	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	nmod	_	_
6	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
7	slowly	slowly	ADV	RB	_	8	advmod	_	_
8	breaks	break	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
9	into	into	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
10	tiny	tiny	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	pieces	piece	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obl	_	_
12	called	call	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	11	acl	_	_
13	microplastics	microplastic	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	12	xcomp	_	_
14	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	19	punct	_	_
15	because	because	SCONJ	IN	_	19	mark	_	_
16	few	few	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	17	amod	_	_
17	microbes	microbe	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	19	nsubj	_	_
18	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	19	aux	_	_
19	eat	eat	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	8	advcl	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=2:advcl
20	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	19	obj	_	_
21	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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No stored speech act for this sentence.

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **last** | present | Plastic | hundreds of years |  |  |  |  | vn cost-54.2 «NP V NP.value»: agent=Theme hundred=Value |
| 2 | **break** | present | Plastic *not said here* |  |  |  |  | into tiny pieces *result*; slowly *property* | vn break-45.1 «NP V PP.result»: agent=Patient into piece=Result |
| 3 | **call** | participle | tiny pieces *not said here* | microplastics |  |  |  |  | vn initiate\_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 4 | **eat** | can | few microbes | kind |  |  |  |  | vn eat-39.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Patient |

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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.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/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:chemistry:029-plastics-useful-stubborn.lesson:10`.

**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): R5-strong ×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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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