---
title: «We should've told you years ago. — Adoption · tree and pragmatics
description: «We should've told you years ago. Who acts: We. A sentence of the lesson «Adoption» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Everyday](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/) / [Adoption](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/522-adoption/) / 18

# Adoption, sentence 18

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«We should've told you years ago.

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**Who acts:** We · **What happens:** tell · **To what, where:** you · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Adoption» 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 (We), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:522-adoption.lesson:18
# text = «We should've told you years ago.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 522-adoption.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): R8-pos-agree ×1
1	«	«	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	_
2	We	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
3	should	should	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	5	aux	_	_
4	've	have	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	5	aux	_	Agree=R8-pos-agree|Haiku=5:aux|HaikuPos=AUX:VBP:Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=1|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin
5	told	tell	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	0	root	_	_
6	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	5	iobj	_	_
7	years	year	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obl:unmarked	_	_
8	ago	ago	ADV	RB	_	5	advmod	_	_
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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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 | **tell** *speech: assert* *in a quote* | should · perfect | We |  | you |  |  | ago *property* | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent you=Recipient |

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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:522-adoption.lesson:18`.

**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): R8-pos-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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