---
title: Silent letters are fossils of old speech. — i before e, silent letters and other famous traps · tree and pragmatics
description: Silent letters are fossils of old speech. Who acts: Silent letters. A sentence of the lesson «i before e, silent letters and other famous traps» of the english course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# i before e, silent letters and other famous traps, sentence 4

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Silent letters are fossils of old speech.

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**Who acts:** Silent letters · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** fossils

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This is a sentence of the lesson «i before e, silent letters and other famous traps» of the english 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 (Silent letters), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:english:010-i-before-e-silent-letters-and-famous-traps.lesson:4
# text = Silent letters are fossils of old speech.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = english
# lesson = 010-i-before-e-silent-letters-and-famous-traps.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): no change
1	Silent	silent	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	amod	_	_
2	letters	letter	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
3	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	cop	_	_
4	fossils	fossil	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	0	root	_	_
5	of	of	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	old	old	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	speech	speech	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nmod	_	_
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | present | Silent letters | fossils |  |  |  | of old speech | tree rules |

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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:english:010-i-before-e-silent-letters-and-famous-traps.lesson:4`.

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

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