---
title: Some families' money depends on things nobody controls, like the wea… — The electric meter, the food bank and «we can't… · tree and pragmatics
description: Some families' money depends on things nobody controls, like the weather at harvest; a bad year is not anybody's fault. Who acts: money, nobody, bad year. A sentence of the lesson «The electric meter, the food bank and «we can't afford it»» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its de
---

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# The electric meter, the food bank and «we can't afford it», sentence 40

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Some families' money depends on things nobody controls, like the weather at harvest; a bad year is not anybody's fault.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** money, nobody, bad year · **What happens:** depend, control, not be · **To what, where:** things, fault

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of the lesson «The electric meter, the food bank and «we can't afford it»» 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 (money, nobody, bad year), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:488-the-electric-meter-the-food-bank-and-we-cant-afford-it.lesson:40
# text = Some families' money depends on things nobody controls, like the weather at harvest; a bad year is not anybody's fault.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 488-the-electric-meter-the-food-bank-and-we-cant-afford-it.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	Some	some	DET	DT	PronType=Ind	2	det	_	_
2	families	family	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nmod:poss	_	_
3	'	's	PART	POS	_	2	case	_	_
4	money	money	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
5	depends	depend	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	on	on	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
7	things	thing	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	obl	_	_
8	nobody	nobody	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Neg	9	nsubj	_	_
9	controls	control	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	acl:relcl	_	_
10	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	13	punct	_	_
11	like	like	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
12	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	weather	weather	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	appos	_	_
14	at	at	ADP	IN	_	15	case	_	_
15	harvest	harvest	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	nmod	_	_
16	;	;	PUNCT	,	_	5	punct	_	_
17	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	19	det	_	_
18	bad	bad	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	19	amod	_	_
19	year	year	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	24	nsubj	_	_
20	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	24	cop	_	_
21	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	24	advmod	_	_
22	anybody	anybody	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	24	nmod:poss	_	_
23	's	's	PART	POS	_	22	case	_	_
24	fault	fault	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	parataxis	_	_
25	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	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 | **depend** | present | some families's money |  |  |  |  | on things | vn rely-70 «NP V PP.theme S\_ING»: agent=Agent on thing=Theme |
| 2 | **control** | present | nobody | things *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn enforce-63 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent thing=Theme |
| 3 | **not** **is a** | present | a bad year | anybody's fault |  |  |  |  | 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:488-the-electric-meter-the-food-bank-and-we-cant-afford-it.lesson:40`.

**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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