---
title: The way people spoke changed, but the spelling stayed. — i before e, silent letters and other famous traps · tree and pragmatics
description: The way people spoke changed, but the spelling stayed. Who acts: people, way, spelling. 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 6

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The way people spoke changed, but the spelling stayed.

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**Who acts:** people, way, spelling · **What happens:** speak, change, stay · **To what, where:** way · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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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 (people, way, spelling), 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:6
# text = The way people spoke changed, but the spelling stayed.
# 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	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	way	way	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
3	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
4	spoke	speak	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	acl:relcl	_	_
5	changed	change	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
7	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
8	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	spelling	spelling	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
10	stayed	stay	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	conj	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **speak** *speech: other* | past | people | the way *not said here* |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **change** | past | the way |  |  |  |  |  | vn dress-41.1.1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **stay** | past | the spelling |  |  |  |  |  | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

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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:6`.

**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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