---
title: Tension builds when the writer slows the action and holds back infor… — Building tension and suspense · tree and pragmatics
description: Tension builds when the writer slows the action and holds back information. Who acts: Tension, writer. A sentence of the lesson «Building tension and suspense» of the english course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Building tension and suspense, sentence 8

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Tension builds when the writer slows the action and holds back information.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** Tension, writer · **What happens:** build, slow, hold back · **To what, where:** action, information

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Building tension and suspense» 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 (Tension, writer), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:english:042-building-tension-and-suspense.lesson:8
# text = Tension builds when the writer slows the action and holds back information.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = english
# lesson = 042-building-tension-and-suspense.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	Tension	tension	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	builds	build	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	when	when	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	6	advmod	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	writer	writer	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
6	slows	slow	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	advcl	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	action	action	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	_
9	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	holds	hold	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	conj	_	_
11	back	back	PART	RP	_	10	compound:prt	_	_
12	information	information	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obj	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **build** | present | Tension |  |  |  |  |  | vn calibratable\_cos-45.6.1 «NP.attribute V»: agent=Attribute |
| 2 | **slow** | present | the writer | the action |  |  |  |  | vn other\_cos-45.4 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Agent action=Patient |
| 3 | **hold back** | present | the writer *not said here* | information |  |  |  |  | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent information=Theme |

<!-- .note -->
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:042-building-tension-and-suspense.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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