---
title: Groups of three are tricky, because two can easily pair off and leav… — Three's a crowd, and the friend who picks someon… · tree and pragmatics
description: Groups of three are tricky, because two can easily pair off and leave one out. Who acts: Groups, two. A sentence of the lesson «Three's a crowd, and the friend who picks someone else» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Three's a crowd, and the friend who picks someone else, sentence 21

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Groups of three are tricky, because two can easily pair off and leave one out.

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**Who acts:** Groups, two · **What happens:** be, pair off, leave out · **To what, where:** one

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Three's a crowd, and the friend who picks someone else» 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 (Groups, two), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:478-threes-a-crowd-and-the-friend-who-picks-someone-else.lesson:21
# text = Groups of three are tricky, because two can easily pair off and leave one out.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 478-threes-a-crowd-and-the-friend-who-picks-someone-else.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): R5-strong ×1
1	Groups	group	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	nsubj	_	_
2	of	of	ADP	IN	_	3	case	_	_
3	three	three	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	1	nmod	_	_
4	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
5	tricky	tricky	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
7	because	because	SCONJ	IN	_	11	mark	_	_
8	two	two	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	11	nsubj	_	_
9	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	11	aux	_	_
10	easily	easily	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	_
11	pair	pair	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	advcl	_	_
12	off	off	ADP	RP	_	11	compound:prt	_	_
13	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	14	cc	_	_
14	leave	leave	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	11	conj	_	_
15	one	one	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	14	obj	_	_
16	out	out	ADP	RP	_	14	compound:prt	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=15:advmod|HaikuPos=ADV:RB:_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | present | Groups of three |  |  |  |  | tricky *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **pair off** | can | two |  |  |  |  | easily *property* | vn amalgamate-22.2-2 «NP V ADVP-Middle»: agent=Patient |
| 3 | **leave out** | infinitive | two *not said here* | one |  |  |  |  | vn neglect-75.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent one=Theme |

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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:478-threes-a-crowd-and-the-friend-who-picks-someone-else.lesson:21`.

**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): R5-strong ×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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- next →: [Three's a crowd, and the friend who pi…, 22](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/478-threes-a-crowd-and-the-friend-who-picks-someone-else/22/)
- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/478-threes-a-crowd-and-the-friend-who-picks-someone-else/)