---
title: Seconds matter in a water emergency, so watching closely and acting… — Thinking like a lifeguard · tree and pragmatics
description: Seconds matter in a water emergency, so watching closely and acting fast saves lives. Who acts: Seconds, watching. A sentence of the lesson «Thinking like a lifeguard» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Thinking like a lifeguard, sentence 21

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Seconds matter in a water emergency, so watching closely and acting fast saves lives.

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**Who acts:** Seconds, watching · **What happens:** matter, watch, act, save · **To what, where:** water emergency, lives

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Thinking like a lifeguard» 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 (Seconds, watching), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:050-thinking-about-outdoor-safety.lesson:21
# text = Seconds matter in a water emergency, so watching closely and acting fast saves lives.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 050-thinking-about-outdoor-safety.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): R2-punct-next ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1
1	Seconds	second	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	matter	matter	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	in	in	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	water	water	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	compound	_	_
6	emergency	emergency	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	_
7	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	14	punct	_	Agree=R2-punct-next|Haiku=2:punct
8	so	so	ADV	RB	_	14	advmod	_	_
9	watching	watch	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	14	csubj	_	_
10	closely	closely	ADV	RB	_	9	advmod	_	_
11	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
12	acting	act	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	9	conj	_	_
13	fast	fast	ADV	RB	_	12	advmod	_	_
14	saves	save	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	parataxis	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=2:conj
15	lives	life	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	obj	_	_
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	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 | **matter** | present | Seconds |  |  | a water emergency |  |  | vn matter-91 «NP V»: agent=Stimulus |
| 2 | **watch** | gerund |  |  |  |  |  | closely *property* | vn search-35.2 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **act** | gerund |  |  |  |  |  | fast *property* | vn act-114-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 4 | **save** | present | watching | lives |  |  |  |  | vn get-13.5.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent life=Theme |

<!-- .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:050-thinking-about-outdoor-safety.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): R2-punct-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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- ← previous: [Thinking like a lifeguard, 20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/50-thinking-about-outdoor-safety/20/)
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