---
title: That is why some borders are ruler-straight lines across deserts. — Africa: countries and capitals · tree and pragmatics
description: That is why some borders are ruler-straight lines across deserts. Who acts: That, borders. A sentence of the lesson «Africa: countries and capitals» of the geography course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Africa: countries and capitals, sentence 2

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
That is why some borders are ruler-straight lines across deserts.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** That, borders · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** ruler straight lines, deserts

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Africa: countries and capitals» of the geography 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 (That, borders), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:geography:013-africa-countries-and-capitals.lesson:2
# text = That is why some borders are ruler-straight lines across deserts.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = geography
# lesson = 013-africa-countries-and-capitals.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	That	that	PRON	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	3	nsubj	_	_
2	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	3	cop	_	_
3	why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Rel	0	root	_	_
4	some	some	DET	DT	PronType=Ind	5	det	_	_
5	borders	border	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	nsubj	_	_
6	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	10	cop	_	_
7	ruler	ruler	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	compound	_	_
8	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	7	punct	_	_
9	straight	straight	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	lines	line	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	ccomp	_	_
11	across	across	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
12	deserts	desert	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	nmod	_	_
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 | **is** | present | That |  |  |  |  | why *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **is a** | present | some borders | ruler straight lines |  | deserts |  |  | 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:geography:013-africa-countries-and-capitals.lesson:2`.

**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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