---
title: A spill or stain is much easier to clean while it is fresh than afte… — Accidents told too late · tree and pragmatics
description: A spill or stain is much easier to clean while it is fresh than after it has dried. Who acts: spill, accident. A sentence of the lesson «Accidents told too late» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Accidents told too late, sentence 18

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A spill or stain is much easier to clean while it is fresh than after it has dried.

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**Who acts:** spill, accident · **What happens:** be, clean, dry

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Accidents told too late» of the everyday 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 (spill, accident), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:343-accidents-told-too-late.lesson:18
# text = A spill or stain is much easier to clean while it is fresh than after it has dried.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 343-accidents-told-too-late.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): R1-cc-next ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1
1	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	spill	spill	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
3	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	4	cc	_	Agree=R1-cc-next|Haiku=2:cc
4	stain	stain	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	conj	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
6	much	much	ADV	RB	_	7	advmod	_	_
7	easier	easy	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	0	root	_	_
8	to	to	PART	TO	_	9	mark	_	_
9	clean	clean	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	7	ccomp	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=7:xcomp
10	while	while	SCONJ	IN	_	13	mark	_	_
11	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	13	nsubj	_	_
12	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	13	cop	_	_
13	fresh	fresh	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	advcl	_	_
14	than	than	SCONJ	IN	_	18	mark	_	_
15	after	after	SCONJ	IN	_	18	mark	_	_
16	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	18	nsubj	_	_
17	has	have	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	18	aux	_	_
18	dried	dry	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	7	advcl	_	_
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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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** | present | a spill or stain |  |  |  |  | easy *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **clean** | to-infinitive | a spill or stain *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn other\_cos-45.4 «NP.patient V»: agent=Patient |
| 3 | **is** | present | accident |  |  |  |  | fresh *property* | tree rules |
| 4 | **dry** | present · perfect | accident |  |  |  |  |  | vn other\_cos-45.4-1 «NP.patient V»: agent=Patient |

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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:everyday:343-accidents-told-too-late.lesson:18`.

**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): R1-cc-next ×1, R7-rel-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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