---
title: Aesop's fables are very old stories, told for over two thousand years. — Reading a story: characters, plot and setting · tree and pragmatics
description: Aesop's fables are very old stories, told for over two thousand years. Who acts: fables. A sentence of the lesson «Reading a story: characters, plot and setting» of the english course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Reading a story: characters, plot and setting, sentence 24

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Aesop's fables are very old stories, told for over two thousand years.

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**Who acts:** fables · **What happens:** be, tell · **To what, where:** old stories · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Reading a story: characters, plot and setting» 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 (fables), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:english:022-reading-a-story-characters-plot-and-setting.lesson:24
# text = Aesop's fables are very old stories, told for over two thousand years.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = english
# lesson = 022-reading-a-story-characters-plot-and-setting.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): R8-pos-agree ×1
1	Aesop	Aesop	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	3	nmod:poss	_	Agree=R8-pos-agree|Haiku=3:nmod:poss|HaikuPos=NOUN:NN:Number=Sing
2	's	's	PART	POS	_	1	case	_	_
3	fables	fable	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nsubj	_	_
4	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
5	very	very	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
6	old	old	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
7	stories	story	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	0	root	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	7	punct	_	_
9	told	tell	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	7	acl	_	_
10	for	for	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
11	over	over	ADV	RB	_	13	advmod	_	_
12	two	two	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	13	compound	_	_
13	thousand	thousand	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	14	nummod	_	_
14	years	year	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	9	obl	_	_
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
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 | **is a** | present | Aesop's fables | old stories |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | participle |  | old stories *not said here* |  |  | year |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

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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:022-reading-a-story-characters-plot-and-setting.lesson:24`.

**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): R8-pos-agree ×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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