---
title: They're fixin' to (about to) start chess instead. — Parents far away: the army, work abroad, prison · tree and pragmatics
description: They're fixin' to (about to) start chess instead. Who acts: hoops. A sentence of the lesson «Parents far away: the army, work abroad, prison» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Parents far away: the army, work abroad, prison, sentence 23

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They're fixin' to (about to) start chess instead.

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**Who acts:** hoops · **What happens:** fix, start · **To what, where:** chess

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Parents far away: the army, work abroad, prison» 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 (hoops), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:519-parents-far-away-the-army-work-abroad-prison.lesson:23
# text = They're fixin' to (about to) start chess instead.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 519-parents-far-away-the-army-work-abroad-prison.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	3	nsubj	_	_
2	're	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	fixin	fix	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	0	root	_	_
4	'	'	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
5	to	to	PART	TO	_	10	mark	_	_
6	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	10	punct	_	_
7	about	about	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
8	to	to	ADP	IN	_	7	fixed	_	_
9	)	)	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	8	punct	_	_
10	start	start	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	xcomp	_	_
11	chess	chess	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obj	_	_
12	instead	instead	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **fix** | present · progressive | hoops *= hoop* |  |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **start** | to-infinitive | hoops *= hoop* *not said here* | chess |  |  |  | about, instead *property* | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent chess=Eventuality |

<!-- .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:519-parents-far-away-the-army-work-abroad-prison.lesson:23`.

**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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