---
title: Combien de + plural noun means "how many": combien de frères, combie… — Questions and simple sentences · tree and pragmatics
description: Combien de + plural noun means "how many": combien de frères, combien de chats. Who acts: Combien plural noun. A sentence of the lesson «Questions and simple sentences» of the french course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Questions and simple sentences, sentence 11

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Combien de + plural noun means "how many": combien de frères, combien de chats.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** Combien plural noun · **What happens:** mean · **To what, where:** many

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Questions and simple sentences» of the french 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 (Combien plural noun), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:french:030-questions-and-simple-sentences.lesson:11
# text = Combien de + plural noun means "how many": combien de frères, combien de chats.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = french
# lesson = 030-questions-and-simple-sentences.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): R6-punct-agree ×1
1	Combien	Combien	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	5	compound	_	_
2	de	de	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	1	flat	_	_
3	+	+	SYM	SYM	_	1	punct	_	_
4	plural	plural	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	noun	noun	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
6	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	9	punct	_	_
8	how	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	9	advmod	_	_
9	many	many	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	obj	_	_
10	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	9	punct	_	_
11	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	12	punct	_	_
12	combien	combien	NOUN	NN	_	6	conj	_	_
13	de	de	X	FW	Foreign=Yes	12	flat:foreign	_	_
14	frères	frère	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	12	nmod	_	_
15	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	16	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=18:punct
16	combien	combien	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	18	amod	_	_
17	de	de	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	18	compound	_	_
18	chats	chat	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	conj	_	_
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- sa -->
- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | Combien plural noun | many |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent many=Topic |

<!-- .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:french:030-questions-and-simple-sentences.lesson:11`.

**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): R6-punct-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/).

<!-- /div -->

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