---
title: Not every silent letter used to be spoken. — i before e, silent letters and other famous traps · tree and pragmatics
description: Not every silent letter used to be spoken. Who acts: silent letter. 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 8

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Not every silent letter used to be spoken.

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**Who acts:** silent letter · **What happens:** use, speak · **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 (silent letter), 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:8
# text = Not every silent letter used to be spoken.
# 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	Not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	4	advmod	_	_
2	every	every	DET	DT	PronType=Tot	4	det	_	_
3	silent	silent	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	letter	letter	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
5	used	use	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	to	to	PART	TO	_	8	mark	_	_
7	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	8	aux:pass	_	_
8	spoken	speak	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	5	xcomp	_	_
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: changed act=assert

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **use** | past | every silent letter |  |  |  |  |  | vn use-105.1 «NP V NP S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality |
| 2 | **speak** *speech: other* | to-infinitive · passive | every silent letter *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn talk-37.5 «NP V» |

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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:8`.

**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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