---
title: They start taking turns, and on wide bits they walk three abreast li… — Three's a crowd, and the friend who picks someon… · tree and pragmatics
description: They start taking turns, and on wide bits they walk three abreast like cowboys in a film. Who acts: Maddie. 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 3

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They start taking turns, and on wide bits they walk three abreast like cowboys in a film.

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**Who acts:** Maddie · **What happens:** start, take, walk · **To what, where:** turns, wide bits

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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 (Maddie), 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:3
# text = They start taking turns, and on wide bits they walk three abreast like cowboys in a film.
# 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): no change
1	They	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	2	nsubj	_	_
2	start	start	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	taking	take	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	2	xcomp	_	_
4	turns	turn	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obj	_	_
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
6	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
7	on	on	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
8	wide	wide	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	bits	bit	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	obl	_	_
10	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	11	nsubj	_	_
11	walk	walk	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
12	three	three	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	13	nummod	_	_
13	abreast	abreast	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	_
14	like	like	ADP	IN	_	15	case	_	_
15	cowboys	cowboy	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	obl	_	_
16	in	in	ADP	IN	_	18	case	_	_
17	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	18	det	_	_
18	film	film	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obl	_	_
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	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 | **start** | present | Maddie |  |  |  |  |  | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V S\_ING»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality |
| 2 | **take** | gerund | Maddie *not said here* | turns |  |  |  |  | vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent turn=Theme |
| 3 | **walk** | present | Maddie |  |  | wide bits |  | like cowboys; in a film; abreast *property* | vn run-51.3.2-2-1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme on bit=Trajectory |

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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: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): 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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- ← previous: [Three's a crowd, and the friend who pi…, 2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/478-threes-a-crowd-and-the-friend-who-picks-someone-else/2/)
- next →: [Three's a crowd, and the friend who pi…, 4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/478-threes-a-crowd-and-the-friend-who-picks-someone-else/4/)
- ↑ 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/)