---
title: They asked when he'd be back. — Lies that grow: one lie needs three more · tree and pragmatics
description: They asked when he'd be back. Who acts: They, he. A sentence of the lesson «Lies that grow: one lie needs three more» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Lies that grow: one lie needs three more, sentence 3

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They asked when he'd be back.

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**Who acts:** They, he · **What happens:** ask, be

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Lies that grow: one lie needs three more» 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 (They, he), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:430-lies-that-grow-one-lie-needs-three-more.lesson:3
# text = They asked when he'd be back.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 430-lies-that-grow-one-lie-needs-three-more.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): R7-rel-agree ×1
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	asked	ask	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	when	when	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	7	advmod	_	_
4	he	he	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	7	nsubj	_	_
5	'd	would	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	7	aux	_	_
6	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	7	cop	_	_
7	back	back	ADV	RB	_	2	advcl	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=2:ccomp
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **ask** *speech: ask* | past | They |  |  |  |  |  | vn inquire-37.1.2 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **is** | would | he |  |  |  |  | back *property* | tree rules |

<!-- .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:everyday:430-lies-that-grow-one-lie-needs-three-more.lesson:3`.

**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): 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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